Perishable artifacts and what they tell us

Archaeologists use the word perishable for anything made from plant or animal material: a basket, a sandal, a length of string, a digging stick, a blanket. In most of North America these things rotted within a few years of being dropped. What remains of most ancient households is a scatter of stone flakes and broken pottery.

The canyons of southeast Utah are an exception. Under the overhangs of sandstone alcoves, out of the rain and above the reach of floods, organic material can last two thousand years or more. The air is dry and drifting dust seals objects off from moisture and insects. That is why Cedar Mesa and Grand Gulch hold some of the best preserved fiber artifacts on the continent, and also why they drew collectors so early.

How the collections came to be

Between 1890 and 1897, ranchers and collectors from southwest Colorado dug through dozens of dry caves and alcoves in Grand Gulch and the neighboring canyons of the greater Cedar Mesa area. Their finds were sold or given to museums, and today they are divided among about six institutions, the largest in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Berkeley. Roughly 4,000 of the objects are perishables: textiles, baskets, sandals, wooden implements, and pieces made of hide and feathers. Field notes were thin, objects from different centuries were often packed in the same crate, and most of the material has never been fully described in print.

The same digs named the region’s earliest farmers. The collectors found burials below the levels of the later masonry dwellings, with baskets in place of pottery, and called the people who made them Basket Makers. The term stuck. Archaeologists now divide that era into Basketmaker II, when people grew maize and squash but had no fired pottery, and Basketmaker III, when pottery, beans and the bow and arrow became common, before the Pueblo periods that followed.

What the objects show

Perishables record what stone and clay cannot: how people dressed, what they carried and which plants they knew.

• Sandals. Basketmaker sandals were twined from yucca fiber, often with a squared toe, and some were woven with raised patterns on the sole. Later Pueblo sandals were more often plaited from whole yucca leaves.
• Cordage. String spun from yucca, milkweed and other fibers, and sometimes from human or dog hair, tied together nets, snares, bags and clothing.
• Baskets. Coiled baskets served for storage, carrying and cooking with hot stones.
• Blankets. Earlier people wrapped strips of rabbit fur around cords and wove them into robes. In later Pueblo times, downy turkey feathers wound onto yucca cord took over the same role, a sign of how important turkeys had become.
• Wooden tools. Atlatls and darts, digging sticks, curved throwing sticks and staffs of Gambel oak show how people hunted and farmed before and after the bow arrived.

Radiocarbon dating has changed what these old collections can offer. Accelerator dating, available since the 1980s, needs only a sample the size of a fingernail clipping, so a single sandal or a frayed cord end can be dated without real harm to the object. Dates of that kind can sort mixed, poorly labeled material into periods, from the Basketmaker era of roughly 200 BC to AD 500 to the Ancestral Pueblo centuries that ended around 1300. Fieldwork on the mesa top since the 1970s has already shown a substantial Basketmaker II population on Cedar Mesa in the first centuries AD, and the cave collections, once photographed, cataloged and published, could fill in how those households dressed and worked.

That work happens in collection rooms. A university or state museum such as the Natural History Museum of Utah, whose anthropology collections hold material from dry cave sites across the state, can support decades of study on objects removed long ago. Edge of the Cedars State Park Museum in Blanding serves as the repository for artifacts recovered from federal land in the region, so legally excavated material from southeast Utah has a permanent home close to where it was found.

Why they must stay where they are

A perishable object that has sat in still, dry dust for fifteen centuries is in a fragile balance. Lift it, and the balance ends. Fibers that look sound can break under their own weight, and skin oils, sunlight and humidity start damage the moment an object is handled. Even tucking a sandal into a crack to protect it destroys the record of where it lay.

That record often matters more than the object. A sandal found beside a hearth and maize cobs, in a known layer, says far more than the same sandal in a drawer. Context is what the 1890s diggers threw away.

Then there is the question of whose things these are. Many perishables in museum collections came from graves. Hopi, Zuni and other Pueblo communities, along with other tribes of the region, regard the people who made them as ancestors and the alcoves as places that still carry meaning. The Hopi Cultural Preservation Office speaks for Hopi cultural interests on and off the reservation, and federal law since 1990 has required museums to consult with tribes over human remains and funerary objects in their care.

On public and tribal land, removing or disturbing an archaeological object without a permit is a federal crime under the Archaeological Resources Protection Act, and the penalties climb with the value of what is damaged. The rule for a visitor is simpler. If you come across a scrap of cordage or a corncob in an alcove, look, leave it exactly where it is, and do not post its location.