Anthropological Collections

Artifacts Go Digital: Expanding Public Access to the history of the Desert West

By Pam Endzweig, Director of Anthropological Collections

The museum is home to a world-class collection of perishable artifacts from the northern reaches of the Great Basin— the high desert and interior drainage extending from eastern Oregon into Idaho, Nevada, California, Utah, and Wyoming. Our collection includes thousands of items, most in remarkably sound condition, preserved by the extreme dryness of high desert caves. Best known are the famous Fort Rock sandals, 1o,ooo-year-old sagebrush bark shoes that remain the world’s oldest known footwear. Other artifacts include basketry, matting, cordage, netting, and wooden objects. Arrows and darts show details of fletching, hafting, and nocking, and foreshafts and knife handles retain evidence of the sinew and mastic that held knives and points in place. Other wooden artifacts include fire drills and hearths, atlatls and bows, snare parts, fire-hardened digging sticks, and framing elements of housing structures known as wickiups.

While many of these pieces have been studied by visiting researchers, and several are on display in our Oregon-Where Past is Present exhibit, their extremely fragile nature requires special conditions for display and preservation. For years, this has meant limited public access to an important record of the West’s Native American history.

That’s why we are delighted to announce the launch of our new Northern Great Basin Archaeological Perishables online catalog—an extensive, searchable database of more than 3,000 artifacts that is now accessible to viewers around the world.

Made possible with funding from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the museum’s own Sandal Society, this digital resource greatly expands access to the ancient history of the Northern Great Basin for scholars, educators, students, and the wider public—and along with our ever-growing array of web-based galleries, is a major step towards bringing our collections into the digital age.

And it’s more than a basic catalog: In addition to descriptive labels, the site presents information on raw materials, radiocarbon dates, archaeological localities, and images for hundreds of artifacts—many with multiple views per specimen. It’s also a growing resource. As fiber artifacts are dated through an ongoing collaboration between the museum, BLM, Nevada State Museum, and the University of Nevada, Reno, new data will be added to the site.

The catalog’s fiber identifications originated with work by Tom Connolly, the museum’s archaeological research director, in 1984 and 1985 under a grant from the National Science Foundation. With decade of experience studying ancient basketry, Tom continues to play a key role in the evolving database. 

I’d also like to recognize the key contributions of Elizabeth Kallenbach, the museum’s anthropological collections manager, who served as project manager for this undertaking: University of Oregon students Samantha McGee and Cheyenne Dickenson, who photographed the artifacts; and Erika Milo, also a UO student, who was responsible for object handling and tracking. Traditional technologies expert Steve Allely identified wood artifacts from Catlow Cave and Roaring Springs Cave, providing information that has never been assembled in such a comprehensive way.

Explore the new catalog at uoregonnaturalhistory.pastperfectonline.com