Perishable artifacts from Last Canyon Cave, Montana

Abstract

Perishable artifacts are rare finds in the Northwest Plains and the adjacent Rocky Mountains and any addition to the inventory makes a significant contribution. In the case of perishable objects from Last Canyon Cave in southern Montana, this is particularly true as one of the objects is unique to the region, a sandal. In this paper we describe the two items from Last Canyon, discuss their regional occurrence, and suggest the origin of the technology outside of the Northwest Plains/Rocky Mountains

KEYWORDS:

• perishables
• sandal
• cordage
• Southern Montana

Acknowledgements

We thank Mr. Allen Denoyer for the drawing of the cordage. The Billings, Montana BLM Office funded the work at Last Canyon in a co-operative agreement with the PaleoIndian Research Lab, University of Wyoming. We are especially grateful to Glade Hadden, Carolyn Sherve-Bybee, and Jennifer Macy for both financial and logistical support for the Pryor Mountain project 2007–2018. In addition, we thank Mr. Mike Bies, formerly of Wyoming, Worland Field Office of the BLM for rescuing the sandal from oblivion! Although somewhat unorthodox, I must thank our co-author J.M. Adovasio. Had it not been for his enthusiasm upon seeing the sandal, this paper might never have made it out of a technical report oblivion. While in the process of packing the Last Canyon material for its final resting place at the Montana BLM repository, I thought why not send a picture of the woven piece and the cordage (without identification) to an expert for one final opinion. Before I could push the send button on my computer, Jim enthusiastically and without hesitation replied, “It’s a scandal.” The rest is history. None of this would have been possible without the many capable and caring volunteers and crewmembers who performed much of the fieldwork. Finally, we thank Allison Brewer for allowing us to reproduce two illustrations from her work in Figure 11. Two anonymous reviewers and the editor clarified our thinking and presentation throughout the manuscript. Any errors that may occur are, of course, our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marcel Kornfeld

Marcel Kornfeld teaches anthropology at the University of Wyoming. His research focuses on Paleoindian lifeways, peopling of the Americas, site structure, hunter-gatherers, cultural ecology, chipped stone technology, and human use of rockshelters. Much of the last 30 years has been devoted to investigations of the Hell Gap site, a series of stratified deposits with human occupations spanning from late Pleistocene through the Holocene. Correspondence to: Marcel Kornfeld; University of Wyoming, Department 3431, 1000 East University Avenue, Laramie, WY 82071, USA. Email: [email protected]

J. M. Adovasio

J. M. Adovasio is currently the Director of Archaeology at the Senator John Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Southern Methodist University. His specialties include non-durable technology, geoarchaeology, and the application of high-tech protocols in the excavation of archaeological sites. He has worked in most of the United States and seven foreign countries. He has published some 600 scholarly works, more than half of which are on perishable technology.

Mary Lou Larson

Mary Lou Larson is Professor Emerita of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wyoming. She received a B.A from the University of Wyoming and M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California Santa Barbara. Her field and laboratory research focuses on site formation and chipped stone analysis of Paleoindian times. Born and raised in Wyoming, she is a true blue democrat waiting for Wyoming to vote for a Democrat as President (the last one was 1964).

Judson B. Finley

Judson Finley is Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Utah State University where has worked since 2012. He earned his PhD in Anthropology from Washington State University in 2008. Finley specializes in human-environment interactions in the Middle Rocky Mountains, northern Colorado Plateau, and eastern Great Basin with recent work focused on the chronological and environmental context of the Fremont foraging-farming transition in northern Utah.