Nearly 1,400 years ago, a member of a nomadic people sheltering in the sandstone recesses of Pictograph Cave discarded a basket woven with willow and milkweed fiber. It was a masterful construction that James Adovasio, (Mercyhurst College, Pennsylvania) described as “closely coiled and the stitches so tightly packed that the basket would have easily held water.”
Adovasio, a leading expert in prehistoric perishable artifacts, was asked to examine the basket fragment by the Montana Parks Department, guardian of Pictograph Caves about six miles southeast of Billings.
Housed at the University of Montana in Missoula, the basket piece is among more than 30,000 artifacts recovered in excavation of the complex of three caves by the Depression-era Works Progress Administration between 1937 and 1941.
Under the leadership of state Parks Department archaeologist Sara Scott, the collection is getting renewed attention. A graduate student has been hired to catalogue and organize the artifacts — a process that has already paid off with the rediscovery of two 1-inch bone effigies that were presumed lost. One of the effigies represents a turtle, the other a human face.
In the process of re-examining the collection, Scott contacted Adovasio. He eagerly agreed to take a look at the basket fragment.
After viewing the artifact, he concluded that it “is a wall fragment of a basket that was most likely used as a tray by prehistoric people to parch seeds, separating the husk from the seeds so that they could be eaten.” Adovasio said these early Americans would have placed seeds in the tray with small pieces of charcoal and continually flipped them to heat the seeds but not burn the basket.
“When they are parched like that, the seeds are more easily digestible,” he said.
Even then it was an old technique — one commonly used in the Great Basin area of Utah, southern Wyoming and parts of Colorado, Idaho and Nevada. The basket itself resembles those associated with the Freemont Culture, which flourished in the eastern Great Basin at roughly the same time, Adovasio said.
There’s no way to tell whether the people who left the basket at Pictograph Cave were part of a Freemont diaspora or if they simply obtained the basket through trade. Possibly the weaving technique was passed to each culture by a common ancestor in more ancient times, he said.
With permission from UM, Scott carefully shaved a tiny sample from the basket... Adovasio sent both pieces to Oxford University for a special type of radiocarbon dating called accelerator mass spectrometry. This technique can date materials using minute samples, Scott said.
Results show the basket was made 1,371 years ago, plus or minus 31 years.
Although the excavations of Pictograph and Ghost caves 70 years ago were used by archaeologist William Mulloy of the University of Chicago to develop a prehistoric chronology for the northwestern plains, carbon dating techniques had not been developed at the time. The basket fragment, among the few items with a datable organic origin, are the first carbon dates from the Pictograph Caves artifacts collection.
The basket fragment and tinder stick were found among the top layers during the excavation process, which took archaeologists down 20 feet into deposits. Mulloy used projectile point types and stone tools to establish the earliest dates at 9,000 years ago.
While most artifacts from excavations at the caves are stored at UM, replicas of some are on display at the new Pictograph Cave visitor center, said Doug Habermann at the FWP office in Billings.
The park facility is not a museum and does not have a full-time staff or specialized curators to care for the valuable and rare items found in the caves, he said. But he hopes that Scott’s efforts will result in a database that the public can access.
Now that access to the collection has been opened and efforts are being made to put it in order for future research, Scott said she hopes students and scientists will take advantage of opportunities for further study. She can envision masters’ theses and doctoral dissertations for years to come.
For more, see the Billings Gazette.
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