Imagining Head-Smashed-In: Aboriginal Buffalo Hunting on the Northern Plains.

Frits Pannekoek is an associate professor of heritage studies, director
of information resources at the University of Calgary, and the author of
A Snug Little Flock: The Social Origins of the Riel Resistance of
1869–70.

This is the first book published by Athabasca University Press, Canada’s first open university press. The book can be downloaded free from the press site, although I would hasten to note that the book itself, which is so richly illustrated, is certainly worth the purchase price. The press site also includes a podcast with the author, who is without a doubt one of Alberta’s most engaging archaeologists and characters.

Jack Brink, the archaeologist for Head-Smashed-In-Buffalo-Jump, a world heritage site in southern Alberta since its first development in the early 1980s, writes with great clarity, insight, and commitment. He manages to combine the best of scientific archaeology with the politics of a major site development in engaging, accessible prose. The title of Chapter Six, “The Great Kill,” and its sections “Leap of Faith,” “Overkill?,” “Drop of Death,” “Bones on Fire,” “Let the Butchering Begin,” “Bison Hide as Insulator,” and “Back to the Assembly Line,” well illustrate his approach to writing. For those who are among the 250,000 people who annually have visited the Jump, there is now an opportunity to know more about the site.

Most important to students and scientists, however, should be the expertise that so obviously underlies the book. Jack has spent over 25 years in the field researching buffalo jumps and it is obvious that he knows Head-Smashed-In well. His field work as well as his work within archives and with the Peigan and Blood elders are the very foundation of the book’s exhaustive and painstaking science. It is clear that Brink has the greatest respect for the stories of the Peigan and Blood elders who have been so supportive of his work. Indeed, at the Jump itself, the convergence of the two separate storylines—one Indigenous and one scientific—is what Brink has achieved in Imagining Head-Smashed-In. It is the best of its genre and we should all congratulate Brink and Athabasca University Press on making the story accessible to the world.