Dear Friends,
I’ve been to London just once in my lifetime, during the summer of 2003. My wife, daughter, and I sweltered in our hotel without air conditioning. It was the historical day that London reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
This week, it’s much worse. Temperatures in London have exceeded the century mark by as much as four degrees. Scotland—Scotland!—is much hotter than ever before.
And parts of Europe are burning due to record-sized wildfires. Pretty much the same is happening in the United States and across the globe.
Drought, fire, and searing high temperatures are daily, visceral reminders of climate change.
Our good friends at Emergence Magazine share an impressive photo gallery of climate impacts in the Arctic. Even images of global warming with snow and ice in them, including “drunken trees,” show this terrifying reality. Please take a look.
Archaeology Southwest just wrapped up our Preservation Archaeology Field School (check out student blogs at the links below). As archaeologists, we share a belief that we can learn from the past. Although archaeological science documents past fluctuations in rainfall, temperature, fire, and flooding, we are moving into a global environment that will increasingly exceed what has gone before.
To help preserve the past—not to mention humanity and all beings—it is critical that we learn from the present. The daily headlines and conditions get more extreme with each passing day.
Urgent is an understatement,
President & CEO, Archaeology Southwest
Banner image: Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument © R. E. Burrillo
Commentary: What “Save” Means for Bears Ears and Grand Staircase
With restoration, monument advocates celebrated. Bears Ears was again protected, Grand Staircase saved—but just what does “protect” or “save” mean? At both monuments, the development of all-important new management plans is in the works. These will determine how protection works day to day on the ground. … For both monuments, the management plans will be the product of many meetings and much wrangling among a range of stakeholders—federal, state and local governments, advisory committees, Native nations, local business owners, conservationists, scientists and the public. Stephen Trimble and Carolyn Z. Shelton in the Los Angeles Times | Read More >>
Register Now for Celebrate Cedar Mesa
After two years, we are so excited to finally gather in person again to Celebrate Cedar Mesa! Join us in Bluff UT from September 23–25 for a weekend of building partnerships, education, stewardship, and celebrating the landscape we are all working to protect. Friends of Cedar Mesa | Learn More >>
Analysis: Heritage Resource Looting and Vandalism in Arizona: How Serious is the Problem?
To learn more about the unauthorized damages to Arizona’s heritage resources, we turned to information collected by the Arizona Site Stewards (AZSS). AZSS is the award-winning corps of AZ State Parks volunteers who systematically monitor significant heritage sites on Arizona’s state and federal lands. In effect, regional clusters of AZSS volunteers take responsibility for visiting about 2,400 individual heritage sites at least once a year to collect and report basic information on site conditions, changes, and concerns. Kathryn Leonard, Sean Hammond, Shannon Cowell, Ashleigh Thompson, and John R. Welch at Save History | Read More >>
Winning the West’s 2022 Poll Results
Regardless of political party, Western voters in swing states like Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico told us in a recent poll that the outdoors are central to their way of life. They identify with the region’s outdoor spaces and deeply value access for hiking, hunting, fishing, and camping. Overwhelming majorities say that national public lands, parks, and wildlife issues are not only important to them, but that these issues will play an influential role in how they choose to vote. At the same time, voters are now expressing frustrations, believing politicians in D.C. are out-of-touch and not delivering on what they promised on the outdoor and public lands issues Western voters care so much about. Center for Western Priorities | Read Results and Analyses >>
National Park Service Announces Tribal Heritage Grant Awards
The National Park Service today awarded $537,005 in Tribal Heritage Grants to 11 projects across the country to support the protection of America’s Indigenous cultures. This competitive grant program focuses on what Indigenous communities are most concerned with protecting—oral histories, plant and animal species important in tradition, sacred and historic places, and the establishment of Tribal historic preservation offices. “These Tribal Heritage grants provide support for a variety of important projects that are critical to preserving unique cultural heritage and traditions for future generations,” said NPS Director Chuck Sams. “The National Park Service is committed to working with Indigenous communities to expand partnerships, share knowledge, and connect people with the traditions of the past.” National Park Service | Read More >>
Tribes Seek Return of Belongings Looted at Wounded Knee
Without those items in their tribal homelands, Manny Iron Hawk said, they believe their ancestors are in limbo. “For our way of life, when somebody makes their journey to the other side, their spirit has to go and be released,” said Manny, an enrolled member of the Cheyenne River tribe and a great-great-grandson of a man killed at Wounded Knee. “That didn’t happen for these ancestors.” He said their items and objects need to be brought back “so we can do the proper ceremony and their spirits can take that journey to the other side. They need to come home.” Dana Hedgpeth in the Washington Post | Read More >>
Reconsidering Celebrations at Sites of Enslavement
In 2019, Color of Change, the country’s largest online racial justice organization, raised important issues regarding the practice of hosting weddings and other celebrations at historic slave plantation sites. In response, the National Trust for Historic Preservation hosted in December 2020 the Plantation Weddings Symposium, which brought together staff who work at the National Trust’s sites of enslavement, descendants of slavery, and public historians to work collectively to come up with new strategies, solutions, and questions on how to ethically steward sites of enslavement. The symposium was a collaboration between the National Trust’s Historic Sites Department and the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund. Reconsidering Celebrations at Sites of Enslavement continues that conversation by chronicling the history of sites of enslavement in the National Trust portfolio and the resulting actions taken by the National Trust to ethically steward those sites, while also providing initial guidance for other historic properties addressing similar considerations across the country. National Trust for Historic Preservation | Read More >>
UA Press Announces Arizona Crossroads Series
The University of Arizona Press is thrilled to announce Arizona Crossroads, a new series celebrating Arizona’s history in partnership with the Arizona Historical Society. Throughout its history, Arizona has long served as a crossroads between Native peoples, settler-colonists, and immigrants from around the world. It has been a contested site among peoples, nations, and empires; it is also a place where events, decisions, and struggles have had far-reaching consequences beyond its shifting borders. As the series title suggests, series editors Anita Huizar-Hernández, Eric V. Meeks, and Katherine G. Morrissey, welcome books that deepen our understanding of Arizona as a diverse crossroads and meeting ground within broad national and transnational contexts, whether topical, thematic or geographic (the region, the nation, the borderlands). Open to any topic within any time period of Arizona history, the series will publish scholarship that is cutting-edge and innovative, yet generally accessible and readable to an educated general audience. We are open to a variety of book formats: monographs, multi-authored works, and edited collections as well as broader more synthetic works. Interdisciplinary projects that engage the past are encouraged. University of Arizona Press | Learn More >>
Publication Announcement: The Stately Art of Remembering and Forgetting Indigenous Cultural Identities
Wright, A. M. (2022). The Stately Art of Remembering and Forgetting Indigenous Cultural Identities in the Neocolonial North American Southwest. In Zubieta, L. F. (ed.) Rock Art and Memory in the Transmission of Cultural Knowledge. Springer, Cham. Read Abstract >>
Publication Announcement: Toward an Anthropology of Sexual Harassment and Power
Shulist, Sarah, and Sameena Mulla. (2022). “Toward an Anthropology of Sexual Harassment and Power: Myth, Ritual, and Fieldwork.” American Anthropologist website, July 11. Read Now >>
Position Announcement: Southwest Regional Director, Albuquerque NM
Acquire, preserve, and manage archaeological sites in the Southwest and Great Plains; generate support funds for this program; build public support for archaeological preservation. The Archaeological Conservancy | Learn More >>
Podcast: Indigenous-Led Cultural Resource Management and Heritage Companies
Host Jessica Yaquinto welcomes a panel of Indigenous Cultural Resource Management and Heritage company leaders. The panel includes Dr. Ashley Spivey (Pamukey Indian Tribe), Executive Director of Kenah Consulting (Heritage Voices Episode 43), Desireé Martinez (Gabrileño-Tongva), President of Cogstone Resource Management and Tongva Tribal Archaeologist (Heritage Voices Episodes 9, 17, 46), Jeremy Begay (Diné), Carrizo Archaeological Group, and Steve DeRoy (Buffalo Clan, Anishinaabe/Saulteaux, Ebb and Flow First Nation), co-founder, director and past president of The Firelight Group and founder of the Indigenous Mapping Workshop (Heritage Voices Episode 56). Topics include why they chose CRM/Heritage over other avenues to work in this field, how they bake community benefit into their organizations, what they want Indigenous young people interested in CRM/Heritage to know, and how the CRM/Heritage Industry can better support Indigenous-led firms. Heritage Voices | Listen Now >>
Dispatches from the Preservation Archaeology Field School
Jonah Bullen (University of Tennessee, Knoxville), Meals, Bonds, and Paleoethnobotany >>
Seth Pratt Phillips (University of Arizona), My Thrilling Discovery >>
Ashley Tillery (University of Nevada Las Vegas), Inspired and Determined >>
Aleesha Clevenger (University of Arizona), A Home away from Home >>
Totsoni Willeto (University of Arizona), Decolonizing Archaeology: An Indigenous Perspective >>
Janae Garcia (University of Hawai‘i at Hilo), Ah, Plants! >>
July 25 Subscription Lecture (In Person, Santa Fe)
Michael S. Vigil, The Underbelly of Mexican Cartels. Southwest Seminars | Learn More >>
REMINDER: July 21 Webinar: Ecological Knowledge and Practices of Traditional Indigenous and Spanish Agriculturalists
With Gary Nabhan. For decades, we have been told that southwestern agriculture evolved from a blending of precontact Indigenous crops and technologies diffused from Mesoamerica, blended in historic times with Spanish-derived crops and practices brought in by Jesuit missionaries like Kino or Franciscans like Garces. The truth is much more complex, interesting and fun! Third Thursday Food for Thought (Old Pueblo Archaeology Center) | More Information and Zoom Registration >>
REMINDER: July 26 Webinar: Braiding Knowledges: The Journey of an Indigenous Archaeologist in Academia
With Dr. Ora Marek-Martinez. An archaeologist in the Southwest for over 20 years, Dr. Marek-Martinez will discuss her journey to braiding knowledges as an archaeologist and as a Diné (Navajo) woman in hopes of creating a future that Navajo People envision based on their own understandings and stories of the past. Indigenous Interests Series (Old Pueblo Archaeology Center) | More Information and Zoom Registration >>
July 28 Webinar: Dismantling a Legacy of Misrepresentation
With Melissa Greene-Blye. Too often, journalists fail to offer authentic representations of Native individuals and issues in the news; this presentation will highlight the ways news media, past and present, have contributed to a legacy of misrepresentation of Native peoples with the goal of highlighting ways to improve that coverage in the future. It is a legacy that has limited the ability of Native individuals to tell their own stories and exercise self-determination in the way they are represented in the press as well as in the historical record. It will ask us to reconsider and redefine what we think we know about what it means to be American Indian, by asking us to reevaluate the history we know and the stories we tell ourselves about the people and events that led us to where we are today. Crow Canyon Archaeological Center | More Information and Zoom Registration >>
August 4 Webinar: Cataloging Archaeological Collections at the Edge of the Cedars
With Jonathan Till and James Willian. Since 2018, the Edge of the Cedars State Park Museum has received grant money from the BLM to catalog materials from their collections in southeast Utah. These cataloged artifacts and samples include over 17,000 items (or lots of items) from about 30 collections. This presentation will review some of the collections and materials cataloged, highlighting items that caught their attention and interest as they were encountered. They will emphasize that these materials are available to descendant communities, archaeologists, and other students of the region’s deep history. Crow Canyon Archaeological Center | More Information and Zoom Registration >>
August 9 In-Person Event (Sierra Vista AZ): Arizona & Beyond: Set in Stone but Not in Meaning
With Allen Dart. Mr. Dart will illustrate southwestern petroglyphs and pictographs, and discuss how even the same rock art symbol may be interpreted differently from popular, scientific, and modern Native American perspectives. 1:00 p.m., Henry F. Hauser Museum at the Sierra Vista Public Library, 2600 E. Tacoma St. More information: 520-439-2304 or elizabeth.wrozek@sierravistaaz.gov.
August 18 Webinar: The Full Story of Pueblo Grande (or at Least a Few Chapters)
With Laurene Montero. Pueblo Grande is one of Arizona’s last remaining Hohokam villages with an intact platform mound. The site’s importance to Tribal communities is recognized today and it continues to yield information regarding the past and its connection to the present. Third Thursday Food for Thought series (Old Pueblo Archaeology Center) | More Information and Zoom Registration >>
Video Channel Roundup
Find out which webinars and videos you missed and get caught up at the YouTube channels of our Partners and Friends. (And Friends, please do let us know if your channel isn’t in this list but should be!)
Amerind Foundation
Archaeology Southwest
Arizona Archaeological and Historical Society
Arizona State Museum
Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA
Crow Canyon Archaeological Center
Grand Canyon Trust
Grand Staircase Escalante Partners
Mesa Prieta Petroglyphs Project
Museum of Indian Arts and Cultures
Museum of Northern Arizona
Old Pueblo Archaeology Center
School for Advanced Research
The Archaeological Conservancy
Remember to send us notice of upcoming webinars and Zoom lectures, tours and workshops, and anything else you’d like to share with the Friends.