I am part of a larger team led by Dr. Katelyn McDonough (University of Oregon) reinvestigating the Connley Caves archaeological site (35LK50) located in Lake County, Oregon. I am currently an instructor and field director of the University of Oregon Museum of Natural and Cultural History's (UO MNCH) archaeological field school which we have been conducting the research through. Dr. Dennis Jenkins (UO MNCH emeritus) serves as McDonough's Co-PI. Beginning in 2021 we formally began collaborating with Dr. Geoffrey Smith and the Great Basin Paleoindian Research Unit in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Nevada, Reno.

The site was first excavated by Stephen Bedwell in the 1960s but the speed and brevity of his work has left many researchers to questions his conclusions. We have been excavating at the site since 2014 and antcipate at least two more seasons of excavations. We have so far excavated in Caves 4 and 5 and began excavations in Cave 6. We are also working intensively with the legacy collection recovered by Bedwell that is housed at the University of Oregon Museum of Natural and Cultural History. 

Late Pleistocene lithic assemblages from Caves 4 and 5, and hopefully Cave 6 will serve as some of the primary data for my dissertation research investigating lithic technological and social organization during the Younger Dryas in the northern Great Basin and southern Columbia Plateau. We have published a series of journal articles, have several more in preparation and planned, and will ultimately produce a site-level monograph. Existing publication links can be found below. 

This is a highly collaborative project I am leading that is investigating the chronology and technology of fiber, wood, bone, and lithic tools from Cougar Mountain Cave (CMC), located in Oregon’s Fort Rock Basin. Collaborators include, Katelyn McDonough (University of Oregon [UO]), Geoff Smith (University of Nevada, Reno [UNR]), Elizabeth Kallenbach (UO), Christopher Jazwa (UNR), Tom Connolly (UO), Dennis Jenkins (UO), Brendan Culleton (Pennslyvania State University [PSU]), and Maggie Davis (PSU). We are primarily working with the legacy collections of materials recovered by an ametear in the 1950s, that have long been unavailable for research. Because most of the materials come from a non-professional excavation in the 1950s, our current focus is on radiocarbon dating the abundant organic artifacts spanning the late Pleistocene to late Holocene. Through this research we are investigating the chronology of the site, the raw materials and techniques used in the organic items, the sequence of diagnostic lithics and fiber techniques, and how those answers help us understand the regional and continental picture, especially during the Pleistocene.

Photo by Brent McGregor

This is a relatively new endeavor that I am collaborating with Katelyn McDonough (University of Oregon) and Geoff Smith (University of Nevada, Reno) on. We are working with museum collection from the Lind Coulee site, located in central Washington. Richard Daughtery excavated this site in the 1950s and was the first site of its age and kind excavated in the Columbia Plateau. He recovered abundant bison bones alongside stemmed projectile points and ground stone covered in ocher. Researchers returned in the 1970s to mitigate erosional damage and investigate new questions. While relatively well-studied, espically the faunal assemblage, a number of questions remain, most importantly the chronology. In October 2022, McDonough and I went to Washington State University where the collection is housed and sampled bones, charcoal, and wood for radiocarbon dating. We also subsampled several combustion feature sediment  samples collected in the 1970s to see if site occupants were consuming plant foods. I also intend to do more lithic and spatial analysis on the site as part of my dissertation research. A detailed account of the site excavations can be found on the Washington State University Museum of Anthropology website.