1,600 year old roasting pit with meal still inside

Why old people abandoned their settlements and even left food why all remains buried under the ground, and where are the looters?

Royal Alberta Museum archaeologists beginning excavation in September 2016 at Head-Smashed-in Buffalo Juamp

They dug up a 1,600-year-old roasting pit at Head-Smashed-In-Buffalo Jump in southern Alberta. The oven was intact and still had a prepared meal inside, which could make it the only known artifact of its kind.

“Somebody — probably celebrating the success of a hunt — had a big feast afterward and prepared a bison calf and some kind of a dog, maybe part-wolf, in a pit side by side,” Bob Dawe, the Royal Alberta Museum’s lead archaeologist on the project, said. “They roasted it overnight in the ground. It would have been a delectable feast in the morning.”

The roasting pit was first discovered in 1990, but archaeologists didn’t excavate it until last year, before packing it up and moving it to Edmonton. That process involved laying fiberglass-reinforced plaster strips all over it until they hardened. Dawe said when the plaster hardened, they could pick up the pit with a crane and put it on a truck bound for Edmonton. That was a lot of work, but there’s still a lot left to do

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