Alison Stenger

The hair, found in a core sample during a June 1999 dig, could be one of the oldest found in the Western United States, said Alison Stenger, director of the Institute for Archaeological Studies.

"We came out with a dirt clod and inside the dirt clod was a human hair 14 inches long," she said."It was so old there was no pigment."

While scientists have yet to determine its age, the layer of soil it was in dates back 11,000 to 12,000 years.

The soil beneath the park is part of an ancient buried wetland, one of three being studied by Stenger and scientists from the University of Oregon and Oregon State University.
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"I'm absolutely convinced that there were multiple populations here and the hair represents one of those populations," Stenger said.Those populations could have been here long before modern American Indians appeared, she said.
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The anaerobic bog has a neutral acidity level, which preserves otherwise perishable remains such as strands of human hair, Stenger said.

Reid A. Bryson, Katherine McEnaney DeWall, and Alison Stenger
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Alison Stenger is the director of research at the Institute for Archaeological Studies in Portland, Oregon. Her publications include British Impacts upon Native American Populations in the Northwest; Megafauna, Man, and Pathogens: International Travel in the Pleistocene.

"The critical issue about the ceramics is that we do not know who made them, but whoever it was, it wasn't the more recent inhabitants of the area," said Alison Stenger, an archaeologist with Portland's Institute for Archaeological Studies.

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Stenger, her late partner Charles Gibbs, Steele and their assistants spent 2,000 hours examining intact amulets at the museum and others in a private collection in Portland.

"The critical issue about the ceramics is that we do not know who made them, but whoever it was, it wasn't the more recent inhabitants of the area," said Alison Stenger, an archaeologist with Portland's Institute for Archaeological Studies.
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Stenger, her late partner Charles Gibbs, Steele and their assistants spent 2,000 hours examining intact amulets at the museum and others in a private collection in Portland.