The oldest piece of identified clothing — sandals found in southern Oregon — are older than the volcanic eruption, some 7,700 years ago, that created Crater Lake.
And you can see them, behind a glass case, at the University of Oregon Museum of Natural and Cultural History.
In 1938, archaeologist Luther Cressman, working for UO, led an expedition at Fort Rock Cave near Paisley that uncovered dozens of ancient sandals woven from sagebrush bark and other fibers.
Known as the Fort Rock sandals, the oldest pieces in the collection were later radiocarbon-dated to be 10,400 years old.
“It suggests that there was a pretty substantial occupation there,” said Tom Connolly, director of archaeological research at the University of Oregon Museum of Natural and Cultural History. “We know from ethnographic sources, from the Klamath and Paiutes, that sandals like that were basically wintertime wear.”
What was a thrilling find for modern archeologists was, essentially, a trash heap for the people at the time.
“It’s not terribly durable footwear. They get torn up, worn through pretty quickly,” Connolly said. “They would use them to go into cold-water marshes and lakes for duck hunting and harvesting. Basically, it’s to keep the feet warm. It’s not really to protect your feet from sharp objects.”
Similar sandals were found in southeast Oregon, northwest Nevada and northeast California, across a region known as the Northern Great Basin. The areas are the traditional homeland of the Klamath, Modoc and some bands of Northern Paiute peoples.
The sandals were able to survive millennia because they were left inside dry caves, Connolly said. Decay organisms that cause organic material to break down, such as bacteria and fungi, require food, air and water.
“If you take one of those away, they can’t survive,” Connolly said. “So, in a dry cave, you don’t have the water that organisms need to survive, and decay does not happen. You get the same thing in perpetually wet environments, like peat bogs. Organics don’t decay because there is an absence of oxygen.”
Over the last 20 years, the Great Basin Textile Dating Project has carbon-dated more than 350 pieces of fiber artifacts from the region. The oldest pieces, of corded fibers, came from the Paisley Caves and date back to 12,700 years ago.
It’s not surprising that the oldest identifiable piece of clothing is a shoe. Other textile fragments have been found that are older, but archeologists aren’t sure what they were used for.
“Another very common fiber artifact you find in some of these cave sites is stuff that we call matting,” Connolly said. “It’s just stuff that’s twined together. We don’t know if they were used for sleeping mats or for capes or different sorts of clothing or leggings. Shoes are sort of identifiable.”
Archeologists have learned more about these early Americans by excavating and taking soil samples around old fire hearths, revealing what foods were being prepared.
“We have this developing picture of people using different parts of the landscape, digging roots in the dry ground and getting foods from the marshes and hunting rabbits and ducks and some big game animals,” Connolly said. “There have been a bunch of little bone needles found, where people were probably making clothing.”
What do these sandals tell us about these people?
“I think it reminds us that we’re all just human beings,” Connolly said. “When you look at this whole collection of sandals and sandal pieces, there are big ones and little ones and things that are worn through. There’s kids shoes. There are some that have a little charring on the toe flaps, and you can imagine sparks flying from a hearth fire and landing on grandma’s footwear. You can kind of imagine this family community.”
If you go: Several examples of Fort Rock sandals are on display at University of Oregon Museum of Natural and Cultural History, 1680 E. 15th Ave., Eugene. Hours are 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays, with late hours until 8 p.m. on Thursdays. Admission is $6 for adults, $4 for children and seniors, $12 for a family of up to two adults and four children, and free for veterans, active-duty military, UO students, UO staff and children 2 and younger. Find more information at mnch.uoregon.edu.
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