Southwest Archaeology Today

Southwest Archaeology Today (SAT) is a free e-mail news digest providing subscribers with information about current news and events in Southwest archaeology. Published weekly, SAT is maintained as a community networking tool for professional and avocational archaeologists in the American Southwest and Mexican Northwest. Review our submission guidelines here.

Utah Requests Bears Ears Be Reduced in Area by Ninety Percent

State of Utah Requests Bears Ears Be Reduced in Area by Ninety Percent If maps Utah has submitted to the Interior Department are a guide, Bears Ears National Monument will be drastically cut in size. The state’s vision, shared with Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, is to shrink Bears Ears to one-ten...

New York Times Takes a Look at Crow Canyon's Northern Chaco Outliers Project

New York Times Takes a Look at Crow Canyon's Northern Chaco Outliers Project On the site of a former auto-repair shop here, broken stone walls mark the site of a 900-year-old village that may yield new insights into an ancient desert culture. The ruins are what remains of two “great houses” �...

National Monuments Protect Meaning as Much as Places

Editorial: National Monuments Protect Meaning as Much as Places This site — we’ll call it the Sagebrush Site — is like hundreds of others in the region, in that it is not part of a national monument, or park, or other special protected area. Instead, it’s on a Bureau of Land Management parc...

An Assault upon the Antiquities Act

Archaeology Southwest Stands with the Antiquities Act Archaeology Southwest denounces today’s executive order by President Trump, which requires the Department of the Interior to review national monument designations since 1996 that are greater than 100,000 acres or determined to be lacking in a...

Preservation Efforts are Underway at Tumacacori Mission (8/20/2017)

Preserving Tumacacori A five-year project involving backbreaking, eyeball-bending work is underway to conserve Tumacacori National Historical Park's valuable heritage. And at the end of it all, visitors shouldn't notice a single change. That's the whole idea. Frank Matero, a visiting professor of ar...

Innovative Study of DNA of Domesticated Animals Used to Track Migrations from Mesa Verde

Innovative Study of DNA of Domesticated Animals Used to Track Migrations from Mesa Verde The 13th century Puebloan depopulation of the Four Corners region of the US Southwest is an iconic episode in world prehistory. Studies of its causes, as well as its consequences, have a bearing not only on arc...

The Archaeological Backhoe Master and the Early Agricultural Period Footprints - 8/6/2017

The Archaeological Backhoe Master and the Early Agricultural Period Footprints Not long after Dan Arnit made the biggest archaeological find of his career, he had to go build a parking lot. The news of his discovery—3,000-year-old footprints made by a family walking through ancient fields—had ...

New York Times Examines Three Threatened Monuments

New York Times Examines Three Threatened Monuments: Bears Ears, UT The archaeologist Benjamin Bellorado, a doctoral candidate at the University of Arizona, has conducted research in this area for 20 years. He led me down the side of a trailless canyon on one bright morning, as we stayed on the slic...

The Pace of Vandalism at Our National Parks Continues to Grow - 7/24/17

The Pace of Vandalism at Our National Parks Continues to Grow What can we do as a culture to cut down on incidences of graffiti at our national parks? That’s the question Mesa Verde National Park officials are asking after the park was the recent target of vandals. In a long message posted on the...

Diné and Pueblo Youth Join to Fight Fracking of the Chaco Landscape

Diné and Pueblo Youth Join to Fight Fracking of the Chaco Landscape “Save the sacredness of our land and our water and our air and our soil. With fracking, all of those components in life are at a threat,” Antonio said. The group recently held a “consent dinner” for the communities of Tor...

Wild Potatoes Were on the Clovis Menu

Wild Potatoes Were Apparently Consumed by Clovis Era Peoples A team of archaeologists and anthropologists, led by the University of Utah, has discovered potato starch residues in the crevices of a 10,900-year-old stone tool in Escalante, southern Utah — the earliest evidence of wild potato use i...

New Journal for Bioarchaeology

New Journal for Bioarchaeology Bioarchaeology is a young but quickly growing field that studies how people from the past lived and died, and is most often described as a combination of biological anthropology, archaeology and social theory. However, this field also faces a problem: There are many di...

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