COOS BAY, OR – Southwestern Oregon Community College invites the community to join us on Tuesday, February 11, 2025, at 6:00 pm, for “The Case for Humans Hunting Ice Age Animals in Eastern Oregon 18,000 Years Ago” with Patrick O’Grady, Ph.D., District Archaeologist for Burns District Bureau of Land Management. This is a free event; all ages are welcome.
Coos County residents can join us in-person in the Umpqua Hall lecture room (room 184) on the Coos Campus, 1988 Newmark Ave., Coos Bay.
Curry County residents can join us for a watch party in the Community Room on the Curry Campus, 96082 Lone Ranch Parkway, Brookings.
For those not able to attend in person the lecture will be streamed live on the College’s YouTube channel at: www.youtube.com/@southwesternOR/streams.
About the Lecture:
Rimrock Draw Rockshelter (35HA3855) is a small and shallow rockshelter located in Harney County, Oregon at the north edge of the Great Basin. Situated in wide-open sagebrush steppe country, the location looks much like a thousand other nearby places where one might expect to find stone tools dating from the mid- to late-Holocene. However, the archaeological record at this site ends around 7,000 years ago, shortly after the cataclysmic eruption that formed Crater Lake from Mount Mazama, and human occupation of the site begins much earlier. Dates of 18,000 to 17,000 years before present have been obtained through high precision Accelerator Mass Spectrometry radiocarbon assays (AMS14C) on Camelops and Bison tooth enamel fragments collected from deeply buried archaeological deposits. The teeth are associated with stone tools and chipping debris indicating human contemporaneity at the site. Other evidence suggests that several genera of Pleistocene herbivores were butchered and consumed there. This presentation will include an overview of fieldwork at the rockshelter to contextualize the provenience of the dated enamel fragments.
About the Presenter:
Patrick O’Grady earned his Bachelors, Masters, and Ph.D. from the University of Oregon and worked for their Museum of Natural and Cultural History from 2005 until 2023. Before that, he worked for the Oregon Department of Transportation as a highway archaeologist. He is currently the District Archaeologist and Tribal Liaison for the Burns District Bureau of Land Management in southeastern Oregon where he did much of his research. O’Grady’s focus over the years has been on hunter-gatherer adaptations, Paleoamerican archaeology, geophysical field applications, and zooarchaeology, including the development of a substantial comparative osteological collection for the University of Oregon.
For more information about the lecture series contact Dr. Win McLaughlin, Assistant Professor, Geology at win.mclaughlin@socc.edu or 541-888-7002.
For more information on upcoming lectures contact Krystal Hopper Meyers, STEAM Pathways Assistant, at 541-888-7416, or krystal.hopper@socc.edu.
To learn more about STEM degrees at Southwestern visit: https://www.socc.edu/programs-classes/stem/.
