2025
19
Nov
Trail Memories
Today’s post kicks off our Trails series, a companion to our year-end fundraising campaign. We'll have weekly essays from now until the New Year. Thanks for your support!
Skylar Begay (Diné, Mandan and Hidatsa), Director, Tribal Collaboration in Outreach & Advocacy
New! Listen to the ...
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2025
18
Nov
Human Ancestors Created Tools Continuously for 300,000 Years
Goodness gracious, Friends, do I love the science of tree-ring dating!
My dissertation research, which I published in 1997 as Time, Trees, and Prehistory, explored the 15-year-long effort, from 1914 to 1929, in which Andrew Ellicott Douglass, an astronomer at the University of Arizona (UA) here i...
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2025
11
Nov
Protecting the Chaco Protection Zone
Hi Friends,
As promised, here’s the video/audio (opens at YouTube) of Paul Reed’s recent interview with Four Corners KSJE host Scott Michlin, in which my friend and colleague fiercely defends the 10-mile protection zone around Chaco Culture National Historical Park. The zone was created throu...
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2025
04
Nov
Chaco Zone in Jeopardy, Again
Hi Folks,
Paul Reed here, filling in for Steve this week.
One of our most beloved places—Chaco Culture National Historical Park—is once again threatened. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is moving quickly revoke the mineral withdrawal in the 10-mile zone of protection around Chaco Park....
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2025
03
Nov
SunZia Dawning
John R. Welch, Vice President, Preservation & Collaboration
(November 3, 2025)—I am not big on fall. In my ledger, arborescent polychromes don’t balance out the shortening days or the calls to abandon shorts and sandals for pants and shoes. I favor Fourth of July and Jerry Garcia birthday ...
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2025
28
Oct
Precontact Yup’ik Place Badly Impacted by Typhoon Halong
Dear Friends,
I write to you aboard a flight to my beloved hometown, Chicago.
I’m headed back to the Field Museum, where I worked from 1997 to 2006, to engage in discussions with their new curator of North American archaeology about collaborating on a field- and collections-based project foc...
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2025
20
Oct
BREAKING: Interior Plans to Cut More Than 2,000 Jobs
Dear Friends,
With heavy hearts and our thoughts going out to our many friends and colleagues in service at Interior, we are saddened and frustrated to bring you today’s headline article on looming cuts at the department. The news broke yesterday, and this is a developing story, still in the co...
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2025
13
Oct
Archaeologist Receives MacArthur Genius Grant
Dear Friends,
Last week, we welcomed friends and colleagues to the Corona Room at our Bates Mansion headquarters in downtown Tucson not once, but twice!
The first was Tuesday, October 7, when preservation archaeologist Paul Reed presented “A Very Special Landscape: Trails and the Lava Fields...
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2025
05
Oct
National Parks and Public Lands in Turmoil
Good morning, Friends,
Here is your Preservation Archaeology news of the week. Please send us news stories; interviews, podcasts, publications, and jobs; notices of upcoming events and webinars; info about forthcoming tours and workshops; and anything else you’d like to share with this group. T...
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2025
30
Sep
Four Nations Symposium on Sonoran Rock Imagery Concludes
Proceedings will be shared in a forthcoming volume
Tucson, Ariz. (September 30, 2025)—Last week, Preservation Anthropologist Aaron Wright, of Tucson-based nonprofit Archaeology Southwest, convened a three-day seminar at Amerind, a museum, art gallery, and research center in Dragoon, Arizona. Enti...
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2025
29
Sep
Continuing Coverage & Commentary: Imminent Threats to Public Lands, Parks, and History
Dear Friends,
Another week, another road trip or two.
Honestly, I’m still getting used to the post-Labor Day change in cadence here in Tucson. The extreme heat and the lack of students and snow birds in town really do mean that life is slower in summer. This past weekend, in order to make ti...
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2025
29
Sep
Celebrating Tribal Historic Preservation: Our Takeaways from the NATHPO Conference
Skylar Begay (Diné, Mandan and Hidatsa), Director, Tribal Collaboration in Outreach & Advocacy
with
Anastasia Walhovd (Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa), BIA ARPA Assistance Initiative & Save History
Shannon Cowell, Director, BIA ARPA Assistance Initiative & Save History
Amy...
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