Don’t fence them in: comment on “perishable artifacts from Last Canyon Cave, Montana”

Abstract

Through a framework of ecological zones, rather than state boundaries, the cordage and juniper bark item from Last Canyon Cave provide an example of the long-standing pattern of Great Basin cultural developments extending into the adjacent mountainous areas. Kornfeld and others (2021) present a significant find: a possible plaited mat or sandal fragment from Last Canyon Cave in southern Montana. While new reports of perishable artifacts are always of interest to Plains Anthropologist readers, the article is predicated on fuzzy geographic and temporal concepts. To begin, Ludlow Cave is not in Wyoming or Montana (Kornfeld et al. 2021:384); it is in northwestern South Dakota. While seemingly trivial, this mistake raises larger concerns about imposing the political boundaries of settler-colonists onto Native American cultural territories. In short, Wyoming is not the “High Plains,” and Wyoming and Montana are not equivalent to the “Northwestern Plains.” Should western Wyoming and the adjacent portion of Montana where Last Canyon Cave lies, be included in a “Northwestern Plains” region? Although many archaeologists have persisted in this practice, physical geographers and ecologists place western Wyoming and the Last Canyon Cave area not in the Great Plains province but in the North American Deserts region, more commonly called the Great Basin (Commission for Environmental Cooperation 2006). While it would be simplistic to define cultural areas solely on environmental zones, it seems even more facile to imagine that Native American culture areas coincide with the modern political boundaries of settler-colonist entities, such as US states and Canadian provinces. “Wyoming and Montana” are not coterminous with the Northwestern Plains ecoregion, but include portions of the Northwestern Plains, North American Deserts, andMiddle Rockies zones. Conversely, the Northwestern Plains ecoregion includes most of North and South Dakota, the eastern plains anthropologist, Vol. 67 No. 262, May 2022, 194–196