A Western Stemmed Younger Dryas-Aged Sewing Camp at the Connley Caves, Oregon

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Far West Paleoindian Archaeology: Papers from the Next Generation" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

There is compelling evidence that people throughout the Americas adapted to the cold Younger Dryas winters by manufacturing tight-fitting, sewn clothing. Ethnographic observations of Arctic peoples indicate that they harvested hide animals and manufactured clothing during residential aggregation events in the fall. Researchers have developed expectations of the types and spatial distribution of tools that may represent such events in the Paleoindian archaeological record. University of Oregon excavations at the Connley Caves in central Oregon encountered a robust Younger Dryas–aged assemblage containing Haskett points, a range of other bifacial tools, eyed bone needles, pigment, faunal remains, combustion features, and hundreds of scrapers in a spatial context that fits the expectations of a sewing camp or aggregation locality. In this paper, I present the context of this assemblage and its lithic technological information to make inferences about the human experience in Oregon during the Younger Dryas. I also present new radiocarbon dates from the nearby Cougar Mountain Cave that are the first on sewn leather artifacts from a Paleoindian site in the Americas.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Far West Paleoindian Archaeology: Papers from the Next Generation

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32146