GCAS members and non-members alike are welcome to attend our next monthly meeting on June 19, 2024, at the Roundup Lodge in San Lorenzo (Mimbres Valley). Doors open at 6PM with our monthly summertime potluck so bring your own plates & utensils, and a dish for yourself or to share with the group. At about 6:30PM (or a bit later) we will have a brief business meeting. Immediately thereafter GCAS president, Marianne Smith, will discuss Images in Mimbres Pottery - Plainware to Classic. Join us to explore some common assumptions people make in interpreting Mimbres images, and to consider similarities in ancient and modern ways of seeing.

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Last week, on September 29, the 4th and 5th grade classes at San Lorenzo Elementary School returned to the WNMU Museum for a special tour and workshop day. This was their second year in a row to visit the museum and the GCAS was happy to once again cover the cost of their bus transport and to volunteer to help the museum director and teachers make the day a success.

These young students first learned about the Mimbres and puebloan cultures from the museum director, Danni Romero herself. Then they got busy with a range of hands-on activities. They selected their favorite image from a Mimbres bowl on display, then were challenged to recreate it as their own sketch...

...They examined and sorted a table full of potsherds painted in the Reserve style located at sites in the Quemado, New Mexico area....

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...At yet another workshop station these students painted assorted images in their own designs -- but the results looked like the kind of fine imagery we see in pictographs and petroglyphs at sites throughout our region.

The GCAS will continue to support the industrious young folk at San Lorenzo Elementary and we look forward to making this a regular, annual event at the WNMU Museum. Thanks go to the museum staff, the teachers, the volunteers, and especially the students for having made this day a special one. We'll be all set next year to welcome the San Lo 4th-5th grade classes of 2024!

/s/ webmaster [All photos courtesy of Marilyn Gendron]

The GCAS operated their customary educational booth in Gough Park for Earth Day, April 22, 2023, thanks to members Marty Eberhart, Marilyn Markel, Kathryn McCarroll, and Marianne Smith. The typically breezy April day attracted 67 vendors to Gough Park - 15 more than had attended in 2022! The visiting crowds, estimated by a local newspaper at about 4000, included local residents, out of town visitors, and a healthy number of through-hikers on the Continental Divide Trail. The GCAS earned a prime spot in the park where our volunteers worked three separate tables with hands-on educational activities for all ages, as well as offering plenty of literature for the more intellectually inclined. Our booth displayed wrapped rocks as an eye-catcher and even sold a few to support our GCAS library and general fund. Many more passers-by grabbed our brochures so if you see new faces at future meetings, please make them all feel welcome!

/s/ webmaster [Photos by M.Smith]

Thursdays, 10:00 AM to 3:30 PM, from March 23, 2023, and continuing each following Thursday at WNMU's Museum in Fleming Hall: the public is invited to see the Archaeologist in Action in the museum's second floor exhibit room, currently featuring the Elk Ridge Open House. Visit WNMU Museum director Danni Romero and a group of the museum's volunteer explainers as they process and prepare a new museum collection for future exhibit. Repeat visitors welcome!

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Wednesday January 11, 2023, 4:00PM MST in-person in Silver City, New Mexico; and online via Zoom: sponsored by Silver City's Southwest Word Fiesta, it's a FREE presentation by WNMU's Director of the Fleming Museum, archaeologist Danni Romero, who will discuss the Hidden Word of the Mimbres: Glimpses of Daily Life through Pottery.

On December 4, 2022, nineteen GCAS members and their guests- including our youngest visitor (age six months old!) - visited the Fleming Museum at WNMU. In addition to a guided tour of the Museum's main exhibits, museum director Danni Romero treated our group to the first-ever public showing of their most recent acquisition of Mimbres artifacts, the Clint and Dee (Delk) Johnson Collection.

Jonah Jankovik, a graduate student in Anthropology at Eastern New Mexico University, was one of two recipients of the GCAS's Nancy Coinman Grant Awards in 2021. We awarded Jonah $1000 to offset her transportation and lodging expenses while collecting sand samples throughout the Sapillo Valley drainage, in order to study the sources' relationships to ancient pottery production and pottery exchange among the Lake Roberts Vista and other Sapillo Valley sites. (To those of us who may have earned our university degrees some time during the past century? Please be advised: costs for transport, lodging, food, and tuition have all increased dramatically for kids these days. The GCAS can and should support their research. Contact your faithful webmaster to ask how you can help make it happen for students like Jonah!)

The Covid pandemic caused significant problems to ongoing archaeological research throughout our region, but Jonah overcame those delays to complete her research and successfully defend her master's thesis this past summer. Congratulations, Jonah!

Set aside time on Sunday, December 4, 2022, at 10:00AM - when the GCAS meets for this month's field trip at WNMU's Museum at Fleming Hall for a guided tour by museum director Danielle Romero. Come to view the new and innovative exhibits that Danni and her staff have already put on display, and hear about the museum's work in curating their vast collections. Ask about the museum's plans for future exhibits and how you can become involved in the process!

(For those unfamiliar, the entrance to the museum is across a small parking lot adjacent to the Aldo Leopold Charter School. From downtown Silver City, drive westbound along W 10th Street until it curves uphill and becomes N Louisiana Street right where the school and the museum are located, on the north side of the street. For more details, visit the museum's web page.) We'll see you there!

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On October 7, 2022, the Southwest Kiln Conference's own Jeff Cooper kicked off their event at WNMU in Silver City with a presentation titled Mysteries of Mimbres Mineral Painted Pottery. Jeff described his own research and experiments in replicating Mimbres painted pottery, and he shared his insights with a very attentive audience. Whether you are a ceramicist yourself or simply curious about how the ancient Mimbres pottery was made, you may find the YouTube video of Jeff's presentation just right for you. Please enjoy: https://youtu.be/70CPfsCI7ho

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The 2022 Southwest Kiln Conference is coming to town from Thursday, Oct. 6 thru Sunday, Oct. 9 at Silver City's own Western New Mexico University. Everyone is welcome and the conference is free. Expect to meet potters who work in a variety of ceramic traditions, making replicas of Anasazi, Hohokam and Mogollon pottery, offering glimpses of the entire process from collecting raw clay to forming and firing pots.

WNMU and museum director Danni Romero are hosting a conference room in the museum for lectures, and WNMU is providing an open space for the firing of the kilns. WNMU will also provide overnight parking for conference attendees who intend to boondock; contact Southwest Kiln for parking location and other details.