We of the GCAS are proud to announce the establishment of the Nancy Coinman Grant Awards.

Nancy Ruth Coinman, an archaeologist, university professor, and GCAS member, left a generous gift from her estate to the GCAS upon her death in 2015. Her surviving family made an equally generous donation to the GCAS in Nancy’s memory. These two gifts form the basis of the Nancy Coinman Grant Awards.

These Grant Awards are an essential component of the GCAS's mission. We offer them in furtherance of Nancy's and her family's wishes to help us recognize and support students of anthropology and archaeology in their efforts to study, preserve, and protect archaeological resources and culturally significant places.

For the second half of the 2018-2019 academic year, the GCAS is providing two awards in the amount of $750 each to PhD candidate(s) and/or Master’s-level student(s). All applications will be considered although the GCAS encourages applications by anthropology or archaeology students (Master’s degree students and PhD candidates) enrolled at an accredited university; upon projects related to topics unique to the Mimbres-Mogollon region or the greater Southwest region (the US Southwest and Northwest Mexico); and which indicate financial need or in-kind support.

The deadline for the GCAS to receive applications is December 1, 2018. Please pass this announcement on to your favorite graduate student as soon as possible.

Learn more about our GCAS/Nancy Coinman Grant Awards and get started on the application process here.

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Smokey T. Cat, GCAS mascot and official greeter, security guard, and pest exterminator at the Mimbres Culture Heritage Site, cordially invites everyone to a rodent-free visit.

/s/ webmaster [photo by Marianne Smith]

The GCAS needs your help in fulfilling our mission of educational outreach. Please consider the following four opportunities occurring in late September and through October, three of which take place at the Mimbres Culture Heritage Site.

Pick one! Pick them all! No experience necessary! Enjoy the fresh air and sunshine of Autumn in the Mimbres Valley!

The Arizona State Museum, located on the campus of the University of Arizona in Tucson, has spent the past six years on a massive conservation project of their collection of over 35,000 Native baskets, sandals, cradleboards, mats, and more. They undertook their Woven Wonders conservation project because their vast collection of perishable items required new conservation techniques to safely store them without further deterioration. Moreover, the ASM aimed to make their collection more accessible to the public as well as researchers. This involved not only improving how the collections were physically stored and climate-controlled, but also updating how the items were organized and catalogued. [Photo via Arizona State Museum.]

Lonnie Ludeman, Conference Chair for the 20th Biennial Mogollon Archaeology Conference, announced that this conference is scheduled for NMSU in Las Cruces, New Mexico, from October 11-13, 2018; and is open to GCAS members to attend. 

On Thursday, September 20, 2018, Archaeology Southwest and the Gila River Festival will present a four-hour field trip to the Gila River Farm archaeological site in Cliff, New Mexico. The adobe structures at this site date from the 14th Century CE and are culturally unique in the Upper Gila region. Archaeologists Karen Schollmeyer and Allen Denoyer will guide visitors through the site, discussing the findings from this season's excavations. They will also describe an array of ancient technologies and invite visitors to some hands-on trials of those technologies. If you have never thrown an atlatl or used a stone axe to chop wood, now is your chance.

The group is limited to 30 individuals, so act now! Details are at both Archaeology Southwest and the Gila River Festival; and you register for the field trip through the Gila River Festival, here.

/s/ webmaster [photos by Marianne Smith]

This final post in our DNA trilogy concerns how the genetic analysis of non-human remains enhances the archaeologist's understanding of the past human culture they are investigating. And sometimes opens more and unexpected avenues of research to pursue.

Archaeologists have studied the remains of 14 scarlet macaws recently unearthed from five different New Mexico sites including Chaco Canyon and the Mimbres region. Macaws' feathers were highly valued not just by the macaws themselves, but by Ancestral Puebloans and other cultures throughout the US Southwest.

On about August 31, 2018, site stewards and members of the YCC archaeology crew at Silver City's Aldo Leopold Charter School discovered at least two separate items of vandalism at the beloved Dragonfly Petroglyph site in Silver City, New Mexico:

Vandalism like this at archaeological sites like the Dragonfly Petroglyph is classified as a felony. If anyone has any information about these "Joe + Liz" rock carvings or the individual(s) who made them please contact New Mexico's SiteWatch program at (505) 827-6320 or via email at [email protected]; and/or telephone the Grant County Sheriff's Office at (575) 574-0100; and/or drop the GCAS a line at [email protected].

Let's hold these people to account.

[All photos courtesy of Zacariah Orion Donnelly, leader of the YCC archaeology crew at Aldo Leopold Charter School.]

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Keep your eyes open on social media & YouTube, people - there may be a short video about this that eventually surfaces somewhere. The kind of persons who vandalize, typically can't keep it to themselves for very long. The bigger the vandalism, the bigger the urge to brag about it. These two particular incidents of vandalism at Bandelier National Monument near Los Alamos, New Mexico, occurred in August 2017 and May 2018. They appear to have been very, very big indeed.

KRQE News reported on August 22, 2018: "The National Park Service needs the public's help finding a vandal....Park officials are in disbelief at the damage done at an archeological site called Duchess Castle at Bandelier National Monument in Los Alamos earlier this summer...."

[Photo of Duchess Castle, Bandelier National Monument, by National Park Service.]