Search

Rattlesnake Cave is located on the western shore of Lake Abert in the northern Great Basin of southeast Oregon, one of hundreds of archaeological sites in the Lake Abert/Chewaucan Basin. The site was dug by collectors in the 1950s, and recovered materials were donated to the Fort Rock Valley Historical Society and Homestead Museum in the early 1990s. We analyze 77 artifacts in the assemblage, which includes cordage, basketry, moccasins, as well as wood, bone, and stone tools. We report new radiocarbon (14C) dates for the site, and the results of energy dispersive x-ray fluorescence (EDXRF) on one basalt and nine obsidian bifaces, matching their chemical signatures to regional geologic sources. We discuss the place of Rattlesnake Cave in the broader context of the northern Great Basin while demonstrating how museum collections may contribute to addressing anthropological research questions.

Adovasio et al. (1986) described Early Holocene basketry from the northern Great Basin as "simple twined and undecorated." Cressman (1986) reported the presence of decorated basketry during the Early Holocene, which he characterized as a "climax of cultural development" in the Fort Rock Basin in Oregon. These contrasting interpretations are the product of relatively small basketry assemblages reliably dated to the Early Holocene from this area, as well as the questionable recovery context of some critical specimens. We report on the direct AMS dating of a number of basketry specimens central to this issue. Early Holocene basketry from the northern Great Basin does include decorated and complex structures; however, since most of the dated specimens fall toward the end of the Early Holocene, the evidence presented here does not provide definitive closure to the issue.

The source direction of obsidian artifacts from archaeological contexts in Drews Valley, located on the northwestern Great Basin perimeter, provides evidence for an east-to-west shift in procurement or interaction spheres from Middle to Late Holocene times. For Elko and earlier periods, sources located to the northeast, in Oregon 's Chewaucan Basin, are predominant, and most of the remaining exotic obsidian is from other Great Basin sources, primarily from the Goose Lake basin to the southeast. Within the last ca. 1,300 years, sources on the Modoc Plateau to the southwest predominate, while sources in the Chewaucan and other easterly basins are rare. This shift, precipitated by a combination of factors that may have included environmental stress, conflict, and changing economic opportunities, may mark the initiation of the ethnographic pattern.

The purpose of this study (cf. Connolly 1986) is to organize the archaeological data from the region into an explicit, and broadly applicable, culture-historical model.