Saturday, October 19, 2024 beginning at 4:00PM: the GCAS shifts the regular day, time, and location of our usual October Wednesday meeting to 4:00PM on SATURDAY, OCTOBER 19, 2024, to accommodate our featured speaker and National Archaeology Day. For those wishing to spend all day Saturday in the Mimbres Valley, the fun begins at the Mimbres Culture Heritage Site where folks will celebrate National Archaeology Day from 10:00AM to 3:00PM with assorted activities. Immediately following, from 4:00PM to 5:00PM, the GCAS general membership is welcome to join the general public at the Roundup Lodge where Marilyn Markel will present Apaches on the Mimbres and the Story of the Captive Boy, Santiago McKinn. Promptly after Marilyn's talk concludes at about 5PM, the GCAS will have our typical brief business meeting and we expect to adjourn by about 5:30PM. Given the earliness of the hour, no potluck or refreshments will be provided so that GCAS members can all be safely back home in time for dinner. See you on Saturday the 19th!

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On a very warm and sunny Sunday, August 4, 2024, twenty one members of the Grant County Archaeological Society (GCAS), coming from as far away as El Paso, Texas, gathered together to explore the Archaeological Conservancy’s Treasure Hill site located in our very own Arenas Valley. Archaeologists consider this Late Pithouse-to-Mimbres Classic site (roughly 550 CE – 1130 CE), comprising a total of 100 rooms in 6 room blocks plus an additional 24 outlying sites, to have been the largest Mimbres community in the middle Rio de Arenas/Whiskey Creek watershed. Unfortunately Treasure Hill, like so many other Mimbres sites, has suffered heavy looting from the late 19^th Century to the present. A major road and residential development surround it and it has accumulated windblown trash as well as garbage carried in by unauthorized visitors.Consequently...

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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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.

Wednesday, June 26, 2024, at 6:30 PM in the WNMU Museum - FREE and open to the public: Dr. Jeffrey Ferguson, University of Missouri Assistant Professor of Anthropology/Research Associate Professor, presents: The Next Stage of Archaeometry in Southwestern Archaeology: New Ways to Explore Old Data. Dr. Ferguson explains, "the application of analytical chemistry and other scientific techniques to Southwestern Archaeology can reveal detailed information about ancient behavior from trade and exchange to large-scale social interaction. I will present three main analytical techniques employed at the Archaeometry Laboratory at the University of Missouri Research Reactor Center (MURR) with a focus on what we can learn about people in the past. These techniques have been in use for decades and we are looking at ways to synthesize the accumulated data at much larger scales. I will also present some new research on site identification using drone-based LiDAR in west-central New Mexico." Join Dr. Ferguson in the WNMU Museum's air-conditioned splendor for an informative discussion surrounded by Mimbres artifacts. Although this lecture is free, please consider making a cash donation in any amount to the WNMU Museum at the door to support their ongoing curation efforts.

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Wednesday, May 15, 2024, 6:00PM: the GCAS monthly meeting shifts to the Roundup Lodge in San Lorenzo (Mimbres Valley) for the summer months. Doors open at 6PM for a potluck dinner so bring your own plates, utensils, and a dish for yourself or to share with the group. Brief GCAS business meeting begins at 6:30 PM followed immediately by our evening's Featured Speaker, Preservation Anthropologist Aaron Wright PhD, who will present Indigenous Rock Imagery of the Sonoran Desert. He explains,

Wednesday, April 17, 2024, 6:00PM (New Mexico - Mountain Daylight Time) online via Zoom: The GCAS monthly meeting begins with the usual brief-to-nonexistent business meeting, immediately followed by our Featured Speaker, Kristin Corl, who will introduce us to Investigating Plant and Animal Resources at the Harris Site: An Exercise in Ecosystem Engineering. Kristin explains,

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:

Wednesday, March 20, 2024, 5:00PM (Mountain Daylight Saving Time, 4:00PM Arizona Time): the GCAS transforms our regular monthly meeting into a special hybrid in-person and online Zoom event to be held at the Western New Mexico University Museum at Fleming Hall in support of their curation of the Museum's historic documents and photo archives.

Our Featured Speaker is historian, award-winning author, and GCAS member Carolyn O’Bagy Davis. Carolyn, a fourth-generation descendant of Utah pioneers, has written 16 books on topics ranging from the history of archaeology to Southwestern history to quilting. Her book Hopi Summer was selected as OneBookArizona for 2011, and Desert Trader: The Life and Quilts of Goldie Tracy Richmond, was named one of the Best Books of the Southwest 2012. Carolyn is an inducted member of the Arizona Quilters Hall of Fame and the Society of Women Geographers; she was the founding president of the Tucson Quilters Guild and Old Pueblo Archaeology Center. An accomplished public speaker, she has appeared on HGTV, PBS, and Lifetime programs, and has curated many traveling museum exhibits including the current show: Willard Page: Artist on the Southwest Road, at the Fred Harvey Museum in Belen, New Mexico. Please join us as Carolyn introduces us to Hopi Quilts and Textiles as Cultural Artforms:

Our last field trip of 2023 happened on December 3 when Kyle Meredith guided about 13 GCAS members to the C-Bar Ranch area of the Burro Mountains. The day was cool, dry, and pleasant - well suited to exploring archaeological sites and features on foot. Kyle reported it was a perfect day, with the group about equally divided between established members and folks fairly new to the GCAS. We're certain everyone enjoyed the trip, judging by the photos Kyle and Eduardo Arguello took of people in action.

Kyle provided the two photos shown of pictographs enhanced by dStretch software, and Eduardo shared his group shots. Thanks to both Eduardo and Kyle for their reports!

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