Connley Caves & Fort Rock

Get an in-person look at an active archaeological dig-site that is uncovering and researching ancient civilizations dating back 13,000 years and explore Fort Rock while gaining insight into why this area is home to such evidence of ancient civilizations.

Saturday, October 5th, 2024

about

Adventure: Our adventure will start at Connley Caves, an active archaeological site that lies just south of Fort Rock. We will get an in depth look at the site as well as a presentation from Dr. Katelyn McDonough, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Director of the Archaeology Field School at the University of Oregon, and Richie Rosencrance about the history they are hoping to uncover through their work. After our journey into the past, we will head to Fort Rock, an ancient volcanic tuff ring that rises out of the flatness of the high desert. During our time at Fort Rock, we will embark on a few stunning hikes, enjoying a picnic style dinner as the sun sets to the west.

Naturalist Guided Experience: During the tour, your guides will impart their knowledge about human history in the Central Oregon and Great Basin region, touching on how this now high-desert landscape was drastically different 13,000 years ago and why those differences created a rich and sustainable ecosystem for plants, animal, and humans alike. For thousands of years, people lived and traveled through this area and spent significant time in the caves. Thanks to the protective nature of these caves, material objects from their lives remain intact to this day and are giving us insight into how they lived. Dr. McDonough and her team’s work at Connley Caves focuses on the long-term relationships between the people, landscape, and diet of those that lived here thousands of years ago. Alongside learning about the specifics of Connley Caves and its ancient inhabitants, your guides may also discuss how new and groundbreaking discoveries in the Pacific Northwest have pushed back the timeline of human presence in the Americas from 13,000 years to over 18,000 years!

To learn more about the University of Oregon’s and the Connley Caves Field School’s work, check out this article.

Katelyn McDonough

Dr. McDonough is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Director of the Archaeology Field School at the University of Oregon. Dr. McDonough has over a decade of experience conducting archaeology in the Great Basin and has taught field schools at the Connley Caves since 2014. Her research uses approaches from archaeobotany, palynology, and parasitology to investigate long-term relationships between people, foodways, and landscapes during the last 13,000 years.

Dr. McDonough enjoys collaboration, interdisciplinary approaches, and designing research that uses knowledge of the past to inform issues in the present. Much of her ongoing research focuses on people’s interactions with plants and changing environments during and since the late Pleistocene in North America. In addition to human paleoecological research, McDonough has worked in cultural research management throughout the pacific northwest, and she is actively involved with fieldwork and collections-based research in the Great Basin and Columbia Plateau. Her research also investigates past ecosystem dynamics with the goal of providing better context for understanding cultural change and human adaptations.

Bio courtesy of the Museum of Natural and Cultural History (mnch.uoregon.edu/)

Richie Rosencrance

Richie Rosencrance is a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology at the University of Nevada, Reno. Over the past decade he has worked across the United States in both Cultural Resource Management and academic archaeological research. His primary research interests include the peopling of the Americas, the roles of technology in human evolution, the Western Stemmed Tradition, chronology building, and most generally the archaeology of the Great Basin and Columbia Plateau.