What people put on seldom endures deep time and a scrap of ridden stitching hide of Oregon is redefining the way early life in North America is being perceived. To the north of the Great Basin, there is a group of dry caves that has filled the role of saving delicate things that the rest of the landscape is unable to fulfill. Plant fibers, wood fragments and animal hides normally perish in decades, but these caves preserved them thousands of years- and silently recorded problem solving on a daily basis at the end of the last Ice Age. The outcome of the re-examination, using modern laboratory techniques, of museum holdings and excavation catalogs established many items to a date around 11,700 to 12,900 years of age, many years earlier than the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
The most noticeable thing is a piece of processed elk hide, pierced with a seam: the edge pulled in and out with a cord made of plant fiber and animal hair, knotted. The hide was repeatedly dated in the study and chemical work involving it indicated that it was North American elk. Researchers have characterized it as probably the part of a tight-fitting coat, a shoe, or a bag, and have used it as the earliest known example of sewn hide known. Fine eyed bone needles, instruments requiring a surge of control in carving and refined hands, are found in more than one of the nearby sites in the same assemblages, and as a picture of long-term textile expertise, not an experiment.
Such discoveries were not made in one single instance. In 1958, amateur archaeologist John Cowles excavated some materials in the Cougar Mountain Cave of southern Oregon and, later housed in the Favell Museum in Klamath Falls, they were out of reach by current analytical methods for decades. Farther north, in central Oregon, Paisley Caves has a more long history of research dating back to the 1930s and was later designated to the U.S. National Register of Historic Places. Reanalysis also enabled researchers to directly date fibers and hide, and not to rely solely on related sediments which is a key difference when rebuilding technologies constructed of perishable substances.
It is more than sewing, but the deeper story. Braided and twisted cords, usually three strand rope of sagebrush bark, fragments of woven basketry, and wooden tool parts are also found in the Great Basin collections of caves. The study identified 55 produced artifacts in Cougar Mountain Cave alone of several types of plants and animals such as fiber objects, pieces of wood, and hide. The toolkit described in the work indicates that Ice Age people were mobile and needed tying, stitching, binding, carrying, and repairing, which in the Ice Age setting, where winter cold and distance would have rendered reliable clothing and containers as significant as stone points.
Organic evidence also meets the issue of the early presence of people in North America in this region. Human coprolites, or fossilized feces, have been studied at Paisley Caves by radiocarbon dating, mitochondrial DNA and subsequently lipid analysis to respond to the issue of contamination and mixing of sediments. A single line of research actually established the existence of people there up to 14,200 years ago and a directly dated fragment of bulrush fiber actually served to confirm the integrity of the cave layers.
Textiles do not often feature in pre-history since they do not last long. They did in the dry caves of Oregon, and in doing so, they expose lives of the Ice Age of care, repair and identity in terms of materials that would generally fade away.
