Great Basin Parching Tray- Connley Caves, OR

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Institution: Museum of Natural & Cultural History- U of Oregon

State: Oregon

Object: Basket

Era: Archaic Period

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Connley Cave is a 12,000-year-old rock shelter located in Oregon's Northern Great Basin. The area was used as summer/fall seasonal camp between ca. 5700 to 3200 cal BP. While there, inhabitants consumed saltbush, grass, and cattail seeds in preparation for the winter months.

Cattail seeds have to be processed to become edible. The process involves threshing to loosen seeds from their stems, winnowing to separate the seeds from their shaft and parching the seeds for storage. Early cave dwellers used woven trays, like the one above, to winnow and parch their seeds.

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Sources:

• McDonough, Katelyn N. "Middle Holocene menus: dietary reconstruction from coprolites at the Connley Caves, Oregon, USA." Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences 11.11 (2019): 5963-5982.

• Camp, Anna J. Catlow Twine Basketry through Time and Space: Exploring Shifting Cultural Boundaries through Prehistoric and Ethnographic Basketry Technology in the Northwestern Great Basin. Diss. 2017.

• Geib, Phil R., and Edward A. Jolie. "The role of basketry in early Holocene small seed exploitation: Implications of a ca. 9,000 year-old basket from Cowboy Cave, Utah." American antiquity (2008): 83-102.

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