The Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), and the Department of the Interior have produced a draft Resource Management Plan amendment (RMPA) and Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) that proposes to open more land in the Greater Chaco Landscape Region to oil and gas drilling. Essentially, the agencies' preferred option is to allow drilling and related infrastructure development right up to the current boundaries of the Chaco Culture National Historic Park. For many Native tribes and pueblos, as well as environmentalists and avocational archaeologists, this is suboptimal.

The GCAS Board of Trustees will soon submit a detailed comment to the draft RMP/EIS on behalf of our group as a whole. Meanwhile, you can help protect the Park as well as the Greater Chaco Landscape Region by spending as little as five minutes of your time to submit a comment as an individual, via email. Here's how:

This link goes to an article profiling the ethnographic work of Allison Mickel, associate professor of anthropology in Lehigh University's Department of Department of Sociology & Anthropology. Mickel's current research is focused upon the Middle East but the principles she is examining can apply to any archaeological, cultural, or historic site. In short, she studies the role local communities play in archaeological work. She notes that during centuries of past archaeological investigations local community members, even those actively involved in excavations, have continued to be excluded from stewardship decisions. From the article:

The use of drone technology is becoming more prevalent in a number of industries and businesses, and the field of archaeology is no exception. [At left, two examples of what drones look like - webmaster]

Archaeologists have been using drones to investigate and map archaeological sites as a preliminary step to the time and expense of a formal excavation, although they also employ drones throughout the entire process of some excavations. As opposed to high-resolution satellite imagery, drone equipment is especially useful for making multiple, rapid, low-altitude images that can then be incorporated into more traditional site-mapping methods to make the results of an archaeological investigation more precise.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), and the Department of the Interior have produced a draft Resource Management Plan amendment (RMPA) and Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) that proposes to open more land in the Greater Chaco Landscape Region to oil and gas drilling. Essentially, the agencies' preferred option is to allow drilling and related infrastructure development right up to the current boundaries of the Chaco Culture National Historic Park. For many Native tribes and pueblos, as well as environmentalists and avocational archaeologists, this is suboptimal.

The GCAS Board of Trustees will soon submit a detailed comment to the draft RMP/EIS on behalf of our group as a whole. Meanwhile, you can help protect the Park as well as the Greater Chaco Landscape Region by spending as little as five minutes of your time to submit a comment as an individual, via email. Here's how:

In case you missed it, after a six-month pandemic pause the GCAS is testing the resumption of monthly meetings online via Zoom. This here website has already shared links to help our members set up Zoom and learn about Zoom's most commonly used features.

Now, with big thanks to our August 19, 2020, featured speaker, Allen Dart, we can provide an extra 2-page list of basic Zoom etiquette tips and a handy 4-page cheat sheet for how to use Zoom controls on any one of five types of electronic devices of your choice. Both documents are suitable for printing and are found in one handy PDF file right here: Download ZOOM-basics-controls.pdf (226.4K)

Wednesday, August 19, 2020, 7:00 PM, online via Zoom: the GCAS welcomes our Featured Speaker, Allen Dart, archaeologist with the US Natural Resources Conservation Service in Phoenix and founder/Executive Director of Old Pueblo Archaeology Center in Tucson. His  evening's topic: "Old Time Religion? The Salado Phenomenon in the U.S. Southwest." Join us to hear about how:

Ancient hydrological engineering in what is now the US Southwest was not confined to Arizona's Salt River basin. Archaeologists have studied a complex network of prehistoric bajada canals, aka hanging canals, located around the Upper Gila River in southeastern Arizona's Safford Basin. They estimate that Native inhabitants developed this water management system during the period from about 1250 CE - 1450 CE. [Photo of hanging canal, via Don Lancaster, tinaja.com.]