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.

If you have news, announcements, or events, let us know.

Early Agricultural Era Macaw Discovered in Chihuahua

INAH Reports Mummified Macaw Found in Northern Chihuahua For a long time, the archaeological site of Paquimé, in Chihuahua, was the only pre-Hispanic site in northwest Mexico where remains of macaws were discovered in cultural contexts, but in 2016, residents of the Avendaños ejido in San Francis...

Arizona Archaeological Council Urges AZ House to Reject House Bill 2498

Arizona Archaeological Council Urges AZ House to Reject House Bill 2498, Which Would "Streamline" Archaeological Surveys on State-Range Improvement Projects The AAC has drafted a letter response to Arizona House Bill 2498. The bill and letter response are attached. Please direct any comments to AAC...

The Great Public Lands Sale

The Great Public Lands Sale Next month, hundreds of corporate representatives will sit down at their computers, log into something called Energynet, and bid, eBay style, for more than 300,000 acres of federal land spread across five Western states. They will pay as little as $2 per acre for control...

New Oil and Gas Leases on Chaco Landscape Open for Bid March 8

Despite Protests, Oil and Gas Leases on 4,500 acres of Greater Chaco Will Go up for Bid on March 8 The Bureau of Land Management is under fire from over 100 protests filed in response to a planned sale of oil and gas leases on nearly 4,500 acres of government-owned land in Western New Mexico known ...

Government Shutdown Leaves Our National Parks a Chaotic Mess

Government Shutdown Leaves Our National Parks a Chaotic Mess If you're thinking about enjoying some time at a national park, you might want to check to see if the place you're headed to is even open. On Saturday, hours after the start of the partial government shutdown, dozens of national parks na...

More on the Fight for the Antiquities Act

More on the Fight for the Antiquities Act Trump’s decisions have set the table for the most dramatic legal fight over the Antiquities Act since the Supreme Court unanimously upheld President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1908 designation of the Grand Canyon National Monument in 1920. So, how did we get ...

DNA Studies Further Exploring the Origins of Native America

DNA Studies Further Exploring the Origins of Native America The story of how Homo sapiens spread from Africa to the rest of the world is a tangled epic, full of false starts and dead ends. Yet perhaps nowhere is the puzzle more difficult than in the Americas, two landmasses divided from the rest ...

Hands off the Antiquities Act

Editorial: Hands off the Antiquities Act By asking Congress to exempt Utah from the Antiquities Act, the Deseret News (Dec. 3) places our state at odds with both the legacy of our history and the promise of our future. When the editors write, “Nearly two-thirds of Utah is owned by the federal go...

Abusing Places of the Past Is a Violation of Human Rights

Abusing Places of the Past Is a Violation of Human Rights For many archaeologists, one of the darkest moments in memory was the destruction of the fourth and fifth-century Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban in 2001. That tragedy was later eclipsed by ISIS’s destruction of Baghdad museum artifac...

Has Tucson Lost Its Birthplace?

Has Tucson Lost Its Birthplace? City officials halted and then moved work for a $7 million project Monday after historic preservation activists complained that earth movers were grading a crucial archaeological site at or near Tucson’s birthplace. A private contractor was working Monday morni...

We Are Headed to Court

President Announces Plan to Reconfigure National Monuments President Trump formally reconfigured two big national monuments in southern Utah on Monday, shrinking them by more than 2 million acres and establishing five smaller units within them — a public lands declaration unlike any ever made by...

The President Is Expected to Announce Cuts to Our National Monuments Today

President Plans to Cut Crucial Areas from Two of Our National Monuments Two of the nation’s most scientifically significant landscapes — the Kaiparowits Plateau and Cedar Mesa — could be largely stripped of hard-won protections when President Donald Trump appears in Utah on Monday to announce...

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