Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump

Head-Smashed-In-Buffalo Jump was designated as a World Heritage site by UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee under the following criterion:

Criterion (vi): Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump is one of the oldest, most extensive, and best preserved sites that illustrate communal hunting techniques and the way of life of Plains people who, for more than five millennia, subsisted on the vast herds of bison that existed in North America.

Countless thousands of bison were herded over the edge of the 10- to 18-metre-high cliffs, beginning perhaps 5,700 years ago and continuing until the middle of the 19th century. At the base of the cliff today are skeletal remains, in some places 11 metres deep. Close by is the site of the butchering camp, a kilometre-wide expanse pocked with the remnants of meat caches and cooking pits, and itself underlain with up to a metre of butchered bison bones. The area on top of the cliff was (and still is) a wide reach of prime grazing range. A system of more than 500 stone cairns, at which people built fires or waved blankets, begins 10 kilometres west of the cliff. The cairns helped direct the bison into drive lanes approaching the precipice.