“One sewn hide item is quite possibly a fragment of clothing or footwear.” The weight of that one line, issued by the researchers examining an enthusiastically forgotten collection in the high desert, Oregon, is strange indeed; organic clothing does not last long enough to be debated, much less dated.
The narrative does not start with a contemporary excavation, but with a 50s excavation by amateur archeologist John Cowles in the dry lava-country caves. Cowles excavated one of the largest assemblies of perishable artifacts in the Late Pleistocene in the Cougar Mountain Cave and the adjacent Paisley Caves (both are known to have the large majority of such materials lost to time almost instantaneously in most other archaeological sites). The objects were not available to the experts over decades. Researchers were only able to study what was there because the Favell Museum in Klamath Falls became its owner.
They were not looking at a “lost garment,” but a technology ecosystem. The scientists studied 55 artifacts consisting of 15 plant and animal species and constructed a solid timeline of 66 radiocarbon datings. Fibers, wood and hide survived in the humid dryness of the cave, into the holocene- precisely the sort of evidence that is usually washed away before it can speak.
The two small pieces of hide, joined together with stitching are at the center of that story. The sewn pieces of the Younger Dryas, around 12,900 to 11,700 years ago, are dated using the radiocarbon dating and the collection has an object dated around 12,400 years ago. The stitched margin is interpreted by the researchers as an element of equipped equipment, such as a footwear, a bag, a container, or an edge of a shelter. “While we cannot unequivocally confirm use as clothing. We interpret CMC21-1 to be the margin of a piece of tight-fitted clothing, moccasin, bag or container, or part of a portable shelter.”
Even in cases of small hide pieces, a toolkit may be large. The most notable items include 14 eyed bone needles, which are said to be among the best of the types ever known in the Late Pleistocene. Needles, cordage, and hide in combination also point to practised sewing a technique of warmth which depended upon fit and construction, and not on the simple process of throwing a skin over the shoulders.
The remainder of the picture is filled in with fiber work. The collection consists of cords of various twists and thicknesses and twined fragments that are in accordance with nets, bags, or mats. A single artifact that was found in Paisley Caves, a strip of rabbit fur with the hair still on it, is similar to those clothes that were recorded in the Northern Paiute communities in far more more recent centuries, in which many such pelts were sewed together using plant fibre to form insulating robes or skirts.
There comes a moment of sanity when small-game hunting is introduced into the frame. Archeologists on adjacent sites within about 100 kilometers of the Paisley Caves have recorded huge fire pits containing more than 14,000 rabbit bones and few of other creatures- a finding that has been attributed to communal rabbit drives that would provide both meat and fur and this was backed by net-making and trapping technologies discovered in the caves.
The finds also have a deeper meaning of clothing. The author believes that, in spite of the fact that the beginning of clothing is directly related to the physiological restriction of the human body, its role as a social and cultural mechanism is also significant to the history of humanity. That is, the sewn hide is not merely a rarity of Ice Age craft a rarity of identity, ability, and decision, saved where the dry kept the dry but it is a surviving indication of identity, capacity, and choice, when the dry alone often fails to withstand.
