Sunday, August 4, 2024, 10:00 AM: This month's field trip takes the GCAS to Treasure Hill, located 4 miles east of Silver City in the Arenas Valley and about 1 mile south of Highway 180. Treasure Hill is a heavily looted 15-acre site with a total of about 100 pueblo rooms, ranging from the Late Pithouse to the Classic Mimbres era (about 550 CE - 1130 CE). We will meet at the gate to the site at 10:00 AM sharp but this site is in a sensitive location so please contact trip leader Marianne Smith ([email protected] or phone/text 772-529-2627) for specific directions.

Thursday, October 3 through Saturday, October 5, 2024, Silver City NM: It's the 22d annual Mogollon Conference, hosted by WNMU and the Museum at Fleming Hall.

The Museum will host a complimentary reception for attendees on the evening of October 3 before the two-day conference gets underway on Friday and Saturday at the Bessie Forward GRC on the WNMU Campus. Registration for the conference sessions is $45/person until September 19; thereafter $55/person. BUT: special offer to GCAS members! The Museum needs 3-4 volunteers to help with registration at the conference and would waive the registration fee for those folks! Contact Museum Director Danni Romero to volunteer; check the Mogollon Conference website for all other developing info including fees for the October 4 banquet and the Sunday, October 6 Mimbres Foundation reunion:

Saturday, July 27, and Sunday, July 28, 2024, from 8:00AM - 3:00PM both days: The Imogen F. Wilson Education Foundation hosts the annual Hummingbird Festival at the Mimbres Culture Heritage Site in the Mimbres Valley with hummingbird-banding, music, and other events for all.

The GCAS plans to be there with our traditional outdoor educational booth and used book sale. Come see our displays of artifacts, try your luck at identifying prehistoric ceramic potsherds, and browse our selection of gently-used, affordably-priced, archaeology-oriented books to suit every taste and budget! All book sales proceeds and donations support our GCAS research library and archives. We'll see you at HummerFest 2024!

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Saturday, July 27, 2024, 10AM-noon at the Mimbres Culture Heritage Site: the 2024 Archaeology Fair, presented by directing archaeologist Karen Schollmeyer, WNMU Museum director Danni Romero, and their team: the Preservation Archaeology Museum Curation and Survey Field School, will take place on site and in conjunction with the 2024 Hummingbird Festival at 12 Sage Drive in the Mimbres Valley. The public is invited to this FREE presentation to see the field school's latest research and meet the archaeologists of the future!

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Wednesday, August 21, 2024, 6:00PM Mountain Daylight Time (New Mexico) online via Zoom: the GCAS August meeting features speaker Dylan Person, PhD, who will present How Stone Tool Reduction Styles Varied (or didn't vary) Between Social Units/Family Groups at the Harris, La Gila Encantada, and Elk Ridge sites. Join us on Zoom starting at roughly 5:45 to get situated and socialize before we begin at 6:00 PM sharp with a very brief business meeting after which we bridge to Dylan's presentation. A Q&A session will follow his talk. Check your email inbox for your Zoom invitation about one week before the presentation.

Dr. Dylan Person is an archaeologist who works and does research in the American Southwest and the Great Basin. He received his PhD in 2023 from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas working Dr. Barbara Roth on sites from the Mimbres culture of southwestern New Mexico. His research focused on lithic technology, types of tool-stone used, and how these things related to group interactions and social units at the Harris, La Gila Encantada, and Elk Ridge sites.

Person’s research has investigated lithic debitage, a class of lithic artifacts that were either simple stone flakes used for cutting tasks, blanks for more complex lithic tools, or just stone shatter resulting from lithic reduction. His talk to the GCAS will describe how he has used rock identification and the size and shape of debitage flakes to determine technologically-based styles present in the three Mimbres sites described above. He will also discuss how these relate to social groups both at the individual sites as well as in the greater Mimbres area overall.

Please hop onto Zoom with us to recognize how seemingly random bits of rocks help create a more significant picture of the archaeological record as a whole.

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The GCAS is happy to congratulate our two 2024 summer interns, Trinton Palomarez (first-year intern) and Gloria White (second-year intern), who headquarter at the Mimbres Culture Heritage Site as they train in educational and scientific activities under the supervision of the GCAS's own Marilyn Markel. This is the second year the GCAS has supported each of two high school level students with a summer internship including $250 stipends.

Wednesday, July 17, 2024, 6:00PM: the GCAS monthly meeting at the Roundup Lodge in San Lorenzo (Mimbres Valley) begins with our usual summertime potluck - bring your own plates & utensils, and a dish for yourself or to share with what we expect to be a larger than usual number of guests, including the starving students of the 2024 Preservation Archaeology Museum Curation and Survey Field School, jointly directed by Archaeology Southwest/ASU's Karen Schollmeyer PhD and WNMU Museum's director Danni Romero PhD. Let's feed these folks well, people, they've earned it!

At about 6:30PM we will have a brief business meeting after which we will welcome our featured speaker, Karen Schollmeyer herself, who will share updates on her and her field school team's current work at the WNMU Museum which includes curating the artifacts comprising the NAN Ranch collection.