Identification of Wood Used at Daugherty Cave, WY

Summary

This is an abstract from the "How to Conduct Museum Research and Recent Research Findings in Museum Collections: Posters in Honor of Terry Childs" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

From 1954 to 1957 Dr. Frison excavated Daugherty Cave (48-WA-302). Various perishable artifacts were recovered from the site including moccasins, basketry, cordage, wood, hide and sinew. It is a Late Archaic to Late Prehistoric site on the west side of the Bighorn Mountains in the Northwest Plains. Dr. Frison published on the site in 1968 detailing the artifacts found. Minimal work has been done with the artifacts since housed at the University of Wyoming Archaeological Repository. For this project, I used microscopic wood identification to answer: what types of wood were being used; were materials local or non-local; how this compares to other rock shelters and caves analyzed on the Northwest Plains; were different woodworking techniques used for different wood types; and were different techniques used for different artifacts? Additional information about the site, plants and plant use was obtained from the Rocky Mountain Herbarium Database (RMHS), the Native American Ethnobotany Database and discussions with Dr. George Frison. I was able to create comparisons with analyzed sites in Wyoming and the surrounding area, establish wood resource exploitation, local and/or non-local exploitation and what kind of woodworking techniques were being used at the site and on what object type.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• How to Conduct Museum Research and Recent Research Findings in Museum Collections: Posters in Honor of Terry Childs   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25293