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.

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Commentary: Rosemont Mine Will Be Disastrous for Tohono O'odham Sacred Lands

Commentary: Rosemont Mine Will Be Disastrous for Tohono O'odham Sacred Lands The mountainous area southeast of Tucson is sacred to the Tohono O’odham Nation. For thousands of years, our people have used these ancestral lands to reflect and pray. We gather medicinal plants and food, and bear grass...

Protecting Greater Chaco - Important Updates

Protecting Greater Chaco Acoma Pueblo tribal Gov. Brian Vallo told members of the House Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources at a hearing in New Mexico that not enough is being done to safeguard sacred sites scattered beyond the national park at Chaco Canyon. Many of the sites involve more ...

New Mexico Delegation Introduces Chaco Protection Legislation

New Mexico Delegation Introduces Chaco Protection Legislation Today, U.S. Senators Tom Udall and Martin Heinrich and U.S. Representatives Ben Ray Luján and Deb Haaland introduced the Chaco Cultural Heritage Area Protection Act, S. 1079, a bill to withdraw the federal lands around Chaco Canyon from...

Art Institute of Chicago Postpones Mimbres Exhibition

Art Institute of Chicago Postpones Mimbres Exhibition “Worlds Within: Mimbres Pottery of the Ancient Southwest,” a display of some 70 pieces from about A.D. 1100 made in what is now southwestern New Mexico, was slated to open May 26 in Regenstein Gallery, the museum’s primary space for tempor...

Tribes Come Together to Protect Greater Chaco

Tribes Come Together to Protect Greater Chaco Native American leaders are banding together to pressure U.S. officials to ban oil and gas exploration around a sacred tribal site that features massive stone structures and other remnants of an ancient civilization but are facing the Trump administrati...

Historic Pueblo-Navajo Summit Expected to Culminate in Joint Resolution

Historic Pueblo-Navajo Summit Expected to Culminate in Joint Resolution A historic summit between the Navajo Nation and the 20 sovereign Pueblo nations of the All Pueblo Council of Governors (APCG), will occur this Thursday, March 21, at the Sky City Cultural Center of Acoma Pueblo. Discussion will...

One Million Acres Protected

Breaking News: President Signs Significant Package of Public Lands Legislation—A Million Acres Protected Statement: “National Conservation Lands are the big winners with this legislation, and when public lands win, we all win. These treasured places provide clean air and water, critical wildlif...

House Committee Will Hold First Oversight Hearing on Monuments Review Next Week

House Committee Will Hold First Oversight Hearing on Monuments Review Next Week A meeting between an Interior Department official and a company tied to mineral interests in the Bears Ears National Monument area — almost a month before President Donald Trump requested a review that substantially r...

Public Lands and Repatriation in the News

Congress Passes Major Public Lands Package “This robust, landmark package illustrates that it is possible for political agreement when it comes to caring for the country’s public lands that have natural, cultural and historic significance. The conservation gains in the bill are substantial, pro...

Chaco Landscape Still at Risk

Commentary: Chaco Landscape at Risk What’s happening under Bernhardt’s watch in the remote Greater Chaco Area of northwestern New Mexico illustrates in microcosm why he is perhaps the worst possible choice for the job as top steward of our public lands. Chaco Canyon and thousands of Indigenous ...

BLM Temporarily Defers Leases in Chaco Buffer Zone

BLM Temporarily Defers Leases in Chaco Buffer Zone The U.S. Bureau of Land Management reversed course Friday, saying certain land near Chaco Culture National Historical Park would no longer be offered at an oil and gas lease sale in March. Environmental advocates, tribal groups and Democratic lawma...

Parcels within 10-Mile Buffer Zone around Chaco to Go up for Leasing

Parcels within 10-Mile Buffer Zone around Chaco to Go up for Leasing A high point on the Pueblo Alto Trail at Chaco Culture National Historical Park, a climb of more than 300 feet, offers a view of landscape scattered with purple-brown brush and carved with ancestral Puebloan ruins. It is here wher...

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