Lovelock Cave: The World's Oldest Duck Decoys

A few miles outside the town of Lovelock, a cave in the desert hills held a secret for thousands of years. Lovelock Cave was used continuously by Native peoples for more than four thousand years, and when archaeologists finally got inside in nineteen twelve, they found more than ten thousand specimens, baskets, woven mats, sandals, nets, and one discovery unlike anything found anywhere else in the world.

Nestled deep in the deposits was a cache of duck decoys crafted from tule rushes, the marsh grass that once fringed the ancient lake that covered this basin. The decoys were so finely made that most still had feathers attached. They were two thousand years old, and they are the oldest duck decoys ever found on Earth. One of them, the Tule Duck Decoy, is today the official State Artifact of Nevada.

The cave first came to outside attention in nineteen eleven, when two guano miners named James Hart and David Pugh stripped roughly three to six feet of accumulated bat dung to ship to a Hawaiian fertilizer company. In the process they discovered the artifacts beneath. Alfred Kroeber, founder of the University of California's anthropology department, learned of the find and sent Llewellyn Loud to excavate the site the following summer. Loud's work in nineteen twelve was the first formal cave excavation in Nevada's history.

The oldest layer of occupation traces back to Northern Paiute ancestors who sheltered and stored goods here millennia before European contact. The cave's contents document not just hunting, the precision of those tule decoys speaks to a sophisticated understanding of animal behavior, patience, and craft, but a full spectrum of daily life preserved in unusual detail by the dry Nevada air.

Lovelock Cave was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen eighty-four. The town of Lovelock nearby takes its name not from the cave but from a rancher named George Lovelock who donated land for the railroad depot in the eighteen sixties.