Southwest Archaeology Today for December 27, 2007

Southwestern Archaeology Making the News – A Service of the Center for Desert Archaeology

– Rethinking Jared Diamond: At the seminar, Dr. McAnany suggested that the very idea of societal collapse might be in the eye of the beholder. She was thinking of the Maya, whose stone ruins have become the Yucatan’s roadside attractions. But the descendants of the Maya live on. She recalled a field trip by local children to a site she was excavating in Belize: “This little girl looks up at me, and she has this beautiful little Maya face, and asks, ‘What happened to all the Maya? Why did they all die out?'” No one visits Stonehenge, she noted, and asks “whatever happened to the English?”
http://www.cdarc.org/page/44qj – New York Times

– Society for American Archaeology Responds to Time Magazine’s Stance on Antiquities Trade:
http://www.saa.org/Press/Press_Archive/DeanSnowTimeLetter.pdf

– Concern Grows Over Park Service Plans to Reorganize Regional Office in Santa Fe: The National Park Service plans to cut its staff in Santa Fe by a quarter, leave its leased building on the south end of town and consolidate its remaining 70 Santa Fe employees in its historic building on Old Santa Fe Trail. But the Park Service strongly disputes allegations by some Santa Fe employees and retirees that the federal agency will damage the building by putting too many employees there, that it is removing the building’s valuable artifacts or that it plans to close Santa Fe operations altogether.
http://www.cdarc.org/page/4iiz – Santa Fe New Mexican

– Texas Students Learn About Archaeological Fieldwork: San Marcos students received an introduction to professional archaeology recently when they spent a morning walking a local archaeological site with professors at Texas State University-San Marcos. The students, fifth- and sixth-graders in the Hernandez Intermediate School Gifted and Talented Program, walked a site at Texas State’s Freeman Ranch, near San Marcos, with Britt Bousman, Jon McGee and John Lohse of the Department of Anthropology.
http://www.sanmarcosrecord.com/local/local_story_360113450.html

– Surviving Lewis and Clarke: Native American tribes have suffered enormous losses of both territory and cultural heritage in the course of their dealings with the United States. A good example of this past is that of the Nez Perce Tribe, headquartered in Idaho, who relate their history and their cultural pride in Surviving Lewis & Clark: The Nimiipuu Story, the latest video feature on our nonprofit streaming-media Web site, The Archaeology Channel http://www.archaeologychannel.org