Archaeologist Dennis Jenkins at Paisley Cave. Photo Credit: Tamara Jager Stewart / TAC
By Tamara Jager Stewart
The crew gathers around as a student carefully excavates a rounded piece of groundstone almost 13 feet below the ground surface, near the base of Connley Cave 6, to be analyzed for wear, pollen, and protein residues. A relatively rare late Pleistocene find, the apparent scarcity of groundstone technology has led many to downplay the role of plants and seeds in people’s diets during that period. But recent finds in the Great Basin are radically changing that perception—and others about ancient lifeways west of the Rockies.
In the high desert of central Oregon, the University of Oregon’s Museum of Natural and Cultural History (UO MNCH) field school is wrapping up its final field season at the ancient site of Connley Caves in the Fort Rock Basin, where teams have been excavating six weeks almost every summer since 2014. It is a collaborative effort between the Bureau of Land Management, UO MNCH, and in recent years, the addition of the University of Nevada. Humans intermittently occupied this string of eight shallow rockshelters overlooking Paulina Marsh for more than 12,000 years. Here, top Great Basin archaeologists and students from the universities of Oregon, Nevada, Utah, and Willamette, the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, and Oregon State University—as well as volunteers—are digging into some of the most ancient cultural deposits on the continent to try to piece together a new story of Pleistocene peoples of the Great Basin and Columbia Plateau, regions within what is known as the Intermountain West. Turns out these ancient inhabitants, using a distinctive stone tool technology called the Western Stemmed Tradition (WST), were key players in the peopling of the Americas. Their stone tool tradition is at least as old, and likely older, than Clovis culture in this region.
Now retired after 32 years leading the UO field school, Dennis Jenkins, senior UO research archaeologist emeritus, has passed the torch to the highly capable Katelyn McDonough, UO assistant professor, curator of Great Basin archaeology at the MNCH and now field school director. She joined Richie Rosencrance and co-principal investigator Geoffrey Smith of the University of Nevada. Rosencrance is a Ph.D. candidate and Smith is executive director of the Artemisia Archaeological Research Fund and regents’ professor. At the field school, students work in pairs, with one down in the pit excavating and the other on top helping record what they uncover. A sense of urgency is palpable as the crew seeks to reach beach gravels, which mark the bottom of the site, by the end of this final field season—just two weeks away. Numerous experts from many disciplines have visited the excavations and provided input. “It’s so gratifying to bring in researchers with other perspectives. It’s an outstanding collaborative project,” Jenkins said. He still plays a vital role in the field school, eager to jump into the pit to assist or to identify a unique find, work the total station to map everything in situ, or provide important moral support. The field school also includes pedestrian surveys to both equip the students with the skills needed to be professional archaeologists and to better understand past uses of the landscape.
This is an excerpt of Collaborative research shines a spotlight on the Ancient Great Basin and Columbia Plateau, Winter 2024-25 | Vol. 28 No. 4. Subscribe to read the full text.
FURTHER READING
Current Perspective on Stemmed and Fluted Technologies in the American Far West, edited by Katelyn N. McDonough, Richard L. Rosencrance, and Jordan E. Pratt, University of Utah Press (2024), uofupress.com
Expanding Paleoindian Diet Breadth: Paleoethnobotany of Connley Cave 5, Oregon, USA, by Katelyn N. McDonough, Jaime L. Kennedy, Richard L. Rosencrance, Justin A. Holcomb, Dennis L. Jenkins and Kathryn Puseman, American Antiquity (2022), tinyurl.com/PaleoindianDiet
