Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Human Adaptation to a Variable Environment

The goal of this doctoral dissertation project is to understand human-environmental interactions more fully in the Northern Great Basin since the late Pleistocene era. Paleoethnobotany is a rapidly developing field within archaeology that examines the relationship between people and plants in the past, and this project uses paleoethnobotanical remains from ancient basketry to explore the relationship between plants and societies.

Archaeological excavation of caves and rock shelters in the Great Basin have collectively produced one of the largest textile artifact collections in the world. The research team will identify plant materials used in textiles, spanning the late Pleistocene through late Holocene eras to examine how people utilized plant communities over time and to study how plant selection relates to known environmental conditions and changing settlement-subsistence models for this region.

In this region traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) about native plants used in basketry is constantly evolving. This research provides important long-term data on culturally significant indigenous plants and supports continuity of traditional weaving evident in nineteenth century and contemporary Klamath, Modoc, and Northern Paiute basketry. To achieve this, the project funds tribal member collaboration for exhibit content for the University of Oregon Museum of Natural and Cultural History (MNCH), undergraduate student laboratory assistance and training in fiber identification, radiocarbon dating, and archaeobotanical analysis, with project results made available on-line through the MNCH archaeological textile database.

The archaeological site of Paisley Caves in eastern Oregon has been occupied at various periods in time over a span of more than 14,000-years and is one of the oldest sites in North America. Among some of the most significant finds is a textile artifact assemblage numbering 500 specimens that includes fine cordage and thread, netting, rope, basketry, matting, and sandals.

For millennia, small groups living in the Northern Great Basin relied on lakeshore marsh ecosystems, seasonal springs, and dry upland steppe shrub zones for subsistence and fiber materials during different seasons. Archaeological and paleoenvironmental data suggest transitions between cave and rock shelters to open-air locales close to permanent lakes and ponds relate to wetter or more arid climatic shifts, in which pluvial lakeshore levels either rose or fell at different times throughout the Holocene.

Researchers use identified plant taxa to augment what is known about changing subsistence regimes and settlement organization which have been posited as responses to these climatic changes. Plant selection for textile construction also contributes to what is known about seasonal use of wetland and upland habitats. Fiber identification procedures developed for this project, including polarized light and scanning electron microscopy with elemental analysis, advance archaeobotanical methods more generally.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.