Preliminary Insights from the Cache Cave Textile Assemblage

Summary

Much of what is known about the pre-contact textile industries of interior Chumash peoples derives from early archaeological investigations and nonprofessional collections acquired from caves and rockshelters during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The vast majority of this material is undated, poorly provenienced, and underreported, which makes interpreting such artifacts’ technological stylistic variability and significance difficult. Recent recovery of more than 500 fragments of cordage, baskets, basket impressions in asphaltum, mats, and nets from secure archaeological contexts at the Cache Cave site thus stands to enhance considerably our understanding of interior Chumash woven technologies. This paper presents the results of preliminary technological stylistic analyses of the assemblage, considers insights from this material into the use of the site, and places the Cache Cave textile assemblage within the context of previous research on Chumash woven articles.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Cache Cave in Context: Unveiling New Discoveries in South Central California

Keywords

Spatial Coverage