Summer 1999
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Our understanding of the early native inhabitants of the New World–and Oregon in particular–has leapt forward with the discovery by University of Oregon archaeologists of the oldest house in North America.
The researchers discovered the remnants in central Oregon, on the shores of Paulina Lake within the Newberry volcanic caldera. The ancient home site contains structural posts, a fire hearth, tools, and evidence of plants used for basketry, floor mats, roof coverings, and clothing. Radiocarbon dating tests of the oblong house, which was about 14 to 18 feet in diameter (four to five meters) indicate an age of 9,490 years.
To put the discovery in perspective, the famous cliff-dwellings of the Four Corners region in the Southwest are less than 2,000 years old, as are the houses associated with the Mayan pyramids in Mexico. The oldest previously known structure in Oregon, a pit house near Madras, dates back about 6,000 years. But the Paulina Lake house sheltered its inhabitants 9,500 years ago–before the invention of writing, before the Roman Empire, before the pharaohs of Egypt, before Stonehenge.
"This find adds a great deal of detail to our understanding of how the first Americans lived their lives," says Thomas J. Connolly, archaeologist and research director for the UO Museum of Natural History, who headed the investigation. "Our ideas previously were based on small bits of information gathered here and there–a kind of conjectural view. Now we have lots of solid evidence that really paints a much more detailed picture."
Connolly and his associates conducted their fieldwork between 1990 and 1992.
"But before we made the discovery public we wanted to make sure we had what we thought we had–and that took a couple years of work," Connolly says.
From blood residue on tools, for example, it appears the dwellers hunted bison, rabbit, bear, sheep, and deer or elk. Based on remnants in their hearth, their diet included chokecherries, hazelnuts, blackberries, and other fruits and nuts. They also processed hardwood bark, bulrushes and other plants used to make baskets, clothing, and floor and roof coverings. They kept warm and cooked with fires from lodgepole pine, ponderosa pine, and sagebrush.
Details of the Paulina Lake find are presented in Connolly’s book, Newberry Crater: A Ten-Thousand-Year Record of Human Occupation and Environmental Change in the Basin-Plateau Borderland to be published this summer by the University of Utah Press.
"We have good evidence for fairly continuous occupation of Newberry Crater between 10,000 and 7,500 years ago," Connolly says. "But from the time of the Mazama eruption [which formed Crater Lake], we don’t have any evidence for people residing in the area until about 3,500 years ago. That is a gap in our knowledge of three-and-a-half millennia and an indicator of just how much more work remains to be done."
The Paulina Lake site is about 25 miles from another site of major archaeological importance, Fort Rock Cave. In 1938, the late UO anthropologist Luther Cressman led an excavation of this site that uncovered about 90 sandals made of sagebrush bark and dating to the same period as the Paulina Lake site. That discovery altered theories anthropologists had held about ancient North Americans, doubling estimates of how long ago the first humans lived in the Northwest.
"The history of this area is no less interesting than the history of Mexico or Europe or the Middle East," says Tom Connolly. "But a lot of our history here in the Northwest has not been told."
