EUGENE–Archaeologists from the University of Oregon Museum of Natural History earlier this year made national headlines with the discovery of a 9,500-year-old house, North America’s oldest, near Paulina Lake in Oregon’s high desert country.

This September, three of the UO discoverers will lead a tour through the dramatic landscape that nurtured those ancient Oregonians. Tour organizers are now accepting reservations.

Tom Connolly, leader of the team that discovered the ancient house, and Dennis Jenkins, field supervisor for the project, will join museum director Mel Aikens in a Sept. 24—26 trip through the back roads of northern Lake County. All are nationally known specialists in Great Basin archaeology.

The three-day tour includes stops at Newberry Crater, the Paulina Lake house site and Fort Rock Cave, where a cache of ancient sagebrush sandals was found in the mid-1930s. The sandals were featured as "Oregon’s oldest running shoes" in a Nike advertising campaign.

The tour also will include sites in the Fort Rock and Silver Lake basins where the University of Oregon archaeological field school, led by Jenkins, has worked during the past 10 years. Quiet as it seems now, the area appears to have been "a cauldron for highly mobile populations from many different centers," with settlement patterns that changed dramatically, according to Jenkins.

Connolly says trip participants will visit some of the most important archaeological sites in the Pacific Northwest.

"These sites are significant for their great antiquity and for the detail they provide us on the lives of the first Oregonians," he says. "They also reveal information about dramatic climate and landscape changes that affected the lives of people living in central Oregon throughout the past 10,000 years."

The educational tour, sponsored by the Friends of the Museum of Natural History, is geared to adults and older teenagers. The group will depart from Eugene on Friday morning, Sept. 24, and will return to Eugene on Sunday evening, Sept. 26.

Participants living in central and eastern Oregon who make prior arrangements with tour organizers may avoid a trip over the Cascades by joining the group near Bend.

Participants will travel in 15-passenger vans and stay in motels in La Pine and Christmas Valley. Each full-day outing includes trips by van to archaeological and geological sites as well as leisurely guided walks for close examination of the special features of each area.

Cost is $425 per person. This includes double-occupancy rooms, three lunches and one dinner. The fee also includes a one-year membership to the UO Museum of Natural History.

For information, call Full Circle Tours toll-free at (888) 660-4286 or the UO Museum of Natural History office in Eugene at (541) 346-3024.

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