The jeweled crown or a royal robe is not the oldest known “fashion discovery”. It is two small pieces of elk hide, which have been sewed together with fiber cordage, and hidden away out of scientific sight in twenty years.
It is set in the high desert of Oregon, in which amateur archaeologist John Cowles had been digging in the 1950s on Cougar Mountain Cave and the nearby Paisley Caves. What he had cleared was an abnormally delicate record of everyday existence at the close of the last Ice Age, perishable materials which as a rule disappear long before archaeologists can see them. The collection was privately owned but was eventually donated to the Favell Museum in Klamath Falls, Oregon, who opened up the material to researchers.
Upon an examination and analysis of the assemblage by scientists at the University of Nevada and the University of Oregon they recorded 55 perishable artifacts created out of 15 varieties of plants and animals. Fiber objects, wooden fragments and pieces of hides were among the items counted at Cougar Mountain cave alone, a peculiar concentration, at a time when most organic technologies break down. Radiocarbon dates indicated one sewn hide object was around 12,400 years old, around the period of Younger Dryas, a late-Pleistocene period that was related to new cold periods. The scholars explained the sewn hide as two pieces of elk hide joined by cordage, and said that it might be a piece of clothing or footwear.
That one possibility is significant since clothing does not last long. Ice Age wardrobes are frequently re-created indirectly, through tools, residues or images, rather than by the garment.
The hide fragment in the Cougar Mountain assemblage is accompanied by a very rich sewing toolkit: sixteen eyed bone needles, which, in the study, were called among the best of the Pleistocene. Contextually, needles are not just connotative of being warm. They show fitted work union of edges, formation of seams, mending of holes artisanship which transforms a draped covering of an animal into one which moves. The authors related this to the wider purpose of clothing in the evolution of humans, as they put it: Tho even though the origin of clothing is directly connected to the physiological constraints of the human body, its significance as a social and cultural process is equally important to the history of man. They further contributed: The proliferation of bone needles and the existence of adornment objects and very fine-eyed needles indicate that clothing was not merely a means of survival as an essential tool but it was also a means of expression and identification.
To add to the hide, the caves indicate a world of vegetal technologies, which are even more difficult to pick up in the archaeological record. Studies of early textiles have revealed that the earliest hints of weaving and some of the earliest woven fabrics are dated in the Eurasian Palaeolithic around 28,000 to 20,000 years ago as impressions in clay and ties of devices and figurines. Although the fibers themselves may have disintegrated, scientists can occasionally determine the use of plants in the ancient world by the micro-fossils that are resistant to decay including phytoliths, the silica structures left by plants.
At Paisley and Cougar Mountain the perishable record spreads in a different direction: the mixing up of subsistence and craft. There are traps that are appropriate in catching the rabbits and the bones of the rabbits are found and the researchers have proposed that rabbit hides could have been utilized in bigger rabbinic skins like the elks and the bison. The outcome is not so much a one headlug of the “oldest clothing” but an infrequent glimpse at a stratified system-hunting knowledge, fiber work, hide processing, and elegant sewing-constructed to withstand the extreme weather and handed down as culture.
Even more to the point, the Oregon finds emphasize a less well-known fact in archaeology: the collections of certain museums which have been ignored may nonetheless redefine the borders of what is known.
