NEXT MEETING: Wednesday, December 18, 2024, 6:00 PM: the annual GCAS holiday party gets underway in Silver City at the Memory Lane Clubhouse, 2045 Memory Lane (last building on the right as you face the entrance to the Memory Lane cemetery). Doors open at 6:00PM. We’ll announce our Board of Directors & officers for 2025, then go straight into holiday festivities including a potluck dinner and white elephant gift exchange. Bring your best holiday potluck dish to share, your most festively-wrapped white elephant to put under the tree --- and don’t forget your Santa hats! Email Marianne or telephone/text her at 772-529-2627 if questions. Let's all get together one last time before 2025!

NEXT FIELD TRIP: TBA: watch this space.

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March 2019
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May 2019

April 2019

GCAS Field Trip to Old Town and Fluorite Ridge

04_07_2019 Old Town CO IMG_5402Sunday, April 7, 2019, provided fine and sunny weather for a field trip. At least 14 members joined trip leader Greg Conlin on a two-pronged visit to the Old Town archaeological site and later, to the petroglyphs on the Bureau of Land Management's site at Fluorite Ridge. [Tip o' the hat to the GCAS's own Chris Overlock, for sharing the photos in this post!]

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Old School Tattoo Tool

image from s.newsweek.comResearchers at Washington State University have (re)discovered the oldest tattooing tool in all of western North America. [Photo of tool on right, via Newsweek.] This 3-1/2 inch long, dual-needle tattooing instrument made out of two prickly pear cactus spines bound to a skunkbush sumac stem/handle with yucca fiber, had been excavated in 1972 from a midden at the Turkey Pen archaeological site in southeastern Utah. Based on the tool itself and human coprolites and maize cobs found in the same midden, the find was dated to 79-130 CE, about 2000 years ago during the Basketmaker II period. Similar tattooing tools retrieved from sites throughout the US Southwest were much more recent, having been dated to about 1100-1280CE. In other words, the Turkey Pen artifact now suggests that tattooing in our region had been practiced for at least 1000 years longer than previously believed.

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Deferred, For All the Right Reasons

h/t to the GCAS's own Chris Overlock for hipping us to today's news in the Chicago Tribune.

The Art Institute of Chicago has indefinitely postponed the exhibition they had planned for May, 2019, of a private individual's collection of some 70 pieces of Mimbres pottery. The article indicates the Art Institute came to realize that grave goods comprise the majority of this private collection. Such items are inappropriate for public display.

“It’s not art,” said Patty Loew, director of Northwestern University’s Center for Native American and Indigenous Research, who...has followed the controversy within the community of Native American scholars. “If someone dug up your great-grandmother’s grave and pulled out a wedding ring or something that had been buried with her, would you feel comfortable having that item on display?”

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