Danger Cave is a large wave-cut limestone cavern, located in the Bonneville Basin of western Utah in the American southwest. The cave contains evidence of nearly 11,000 years of occupation in the high desert. Preservation of the deposits in the cave is excellent, and intact leather scraps, pieces of string, twined nets, coarse textiles, basket fragments, and bone and wood tools such as knives, weapons, and millstones were recovered.
While preservation is excellent, the stratigraphy of the cave is somewhat muddled, in part because the prehistoric occupations repeatedly modified the cave's ground surface as they lived in it, digging into previous layers for storage pits and to create suitable living spaces.
Radiocarbon dates from Danger Cave range between 11,000 and 300 RCYBP, with at least 37 layers of occupation. Humans were not the only residents of the cave; evidence that woodrats, coyotes and owls have also resided in the cave is apparent.
Danger Cave and Archaeology
Danger Cave was first investigated in the 1930s by Elmer Smith, and extensively excavated in the 1940s and 1950s by Jesse Jennings. Jenning's discoveries at Danger Cave were supporting evidence for the Clovis site and the antiquity of humans in the Americas at the time.
Renewed investigations at Danger Cave were conducted in the 1980s by a team from the Desert Research Institute led by David Rhode and David Madsen. They emphasized the recovery of archaeobotanical remains which demonstrated that pine nuts were a substantial part of the residents' diet.
Sources
Jennings, J. D. 1957. Danger Cave. University of Utah Anthropological Papers 27. Salt Lake City.
Rhode, David and David B. Madsen 1998 Pine nut use in the Early Holocene and beyond: The Danger Cave archaeobotanical record. Journal of Archaeological Science 25:1199-1210.
