Loss of important scientific data does not just happen with cultural artifacts like Mimbres pottery. It happens with fossils, too. GCAS member Kathryn McCarroll links to an article discussing the international trade in blood amber, a fossil-rich amber mined only in Myanmar. Paleobiologist George Poinar recently wrote that "...scientifically valuable fossils...end up in carvings and jewelry and [are] lost for future generations...."

Some scientific news is just too good not to share.

About four years since its discovery, scientists have confirmed that a series of fossil dinosaur tracks, stumbled upon in a trailside rock fall in Grand Canyon National Park, are 313 million years old, making them "...by far the oldest vertebrate tracks in Grand Canyon...More significantly,...they are among the oldest tracks on Earth of shelled-egg-laying animals, such as reptiles, and the earliest evidence of vertebrate animals walking in sand dunes."

As Charlie Pierce says, "Dinosaurs lived then to make us happy now."

/s/ webmaster

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.

On September 4, 2020, the GCAS Board of Trustees submitted 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:

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.

On September 4, 2020, the GCAS Board of Trustees submitted 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:

Many universities, museums, and archaeological organizations have been moving their events and presentations online and most of them are free for the taking. The following list provides an aspiring audience member with a wealth of virtual tours, lectures, and more. If you decide to take part in one, or have another source of online education not listed here, please drop us a note afterwards or leave a comment on this here blog to let us know how your experience was!

Wednesday, September 16, 2020, 7:00 PM: GCAS general meeting via Zoom. No business meeting this time, so we will begin by welcoming our Featured Speaker, University of New Mexico PhD candidate and 2018/2019 GCAS Coinman Grant Awardee Thatcher A. Rogers. Thatcher will describe the findings of his current research regarding "Following the Green Stone Road: Exploring the Upper Gila Connection to Paquimé (Casas Grandes)."

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.

On September 4, 2020, the GCAS Board of Trustees submitted 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:

On behalf of the GCAS general membership, on September 4, 2020, a quorum of the GCAS Board of Trustees submitted a comment to the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Bureau of Land Management opposing a draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) that proposed additional oil and gas development in the Greater Chaco Landscape/Region. The GCAS comment addressed eight issues:

We of the GCAS prefer to keep this here website focused on the archaeological advances made in our own region, but we always make an exception for any DNA research that comes our way. [Maps on right via New York Times.] As reported in the New York Times of July 8, 2020, a new comparative study of the DNA of more than 800 people from Polynesian islands and South America's Pacific Coast discloses contact between ancient Polynesians and indigenous South Americans around 1200CE.