The most revealing technologies of the previous Ice Age would tend to be the ones that would be killed off. Hide, fiber and wood typically decay to silence, leaving stone tools to represent entire lifeways. Dryness in the high desert caves of Oregon broke that trend and left a little museum of that day-to-day engineering, installing hidework to the measure of the individual in North America about 12,000 years ago before the Great Pyramid of Egypt ever grew on the Nile.
The materials are collected in a variety of sites in the Northern Great Basin, Oregon, with the highest concentration of the material in Cougar Mountain Cave and the supplementary material in Paisley Caves. The first wonder of the story is their survival: the artifacts which were meant to be destroyed survived due to the fact these chambers remained dry on thousands of years. What is left is not some dramatic item, but an arsenal of craft cordage, stitching, weaving, wooden parts, which suggests traps and other equipment erected to a cold terrain.
In museum collections and research warehouses, archaeologist Richard Rosencrance and others re- analysed 55 crafted objects that represented 15 plant and animal types using contemporary laboratory techniques to collections collected several decades before. The most striking object is an elk hide fragment, depilitated and bonded with cord composed of plant fibers and animal hair and dated to the late Pleistocene millennia. The team wrote in published accounts that one piece of sewn hide is quite possibly a piece of clothing or footwear fragment, and said that, Should it be so, it is the sole known article of clothing dated to the Pleistocene ever found. These dates coincide with the Younger Dryas, which was a period of cold weather which would have favored tighter, warmer garments over draped skins.
That implication alters the manner in which the assemblage is read. Sewing is not a solitary trick, it is a sequence of connected procedures. Hides have to be washed and removed, fibers have to be picked and processed, cord twisted or woven, needles shaped, and holes put where they are wanted. Thickness of cords and twisting in this collection implies various loads and work-tying, binding, and stitching, and maybe netting. Tangled parts of what appear to be bags, mats, or other portable containers are directed to weaving techniques, and the wooden fragments appear to represent parts of small-game capture systems and not single-use tools.
Of some of the most explicit markings of accuracy lie the eyed needles that have been found at many locations around the region such as the Cougar Mountain Cave, Paisley Caves, Connley Caves and the Tule Lake Rockshelter. Their excellent eyes suggest purposeful choice of threads and close work, and bring into reality the thought that fitted hide clothing was possible and, in cold seasons, close workmanship.
The objects also bear an account of the origin of archaeology itself. The materials of the Cougar Mountain Cave were found in 1958 by an amateur archeologist named John Cowles, and were at that time at Oregon’s Favell Museum in Klamath Falls until the dating and microscopic examination are now possible. It is the discovery of old shelves, in short, which is the discovery of the “new.”
Such of these perishable technologies had become a system in the changing Ice Age climate of the Great Basin: cord to bind and sew, needles to make customized joins, woven shapes to carry and trap, hidework to keep warm, covered. The caves had not just preserved objects, but the logic of how people had used their plant and animal resources in order to live well in the fringes of the glaciers.
