Now's the chance for anyone interested in becoming a SiteWatch volunteer to step up!

SiteWatch coordinator Jessica Badner would like to come to our area on Feb. 4-5 for site steward training. If you know someone that wants to be a site steward please have them call Marilyn Markel as soon as possible at 575-536-9337. Marilyn advises that we need  about 12 people to sign up to have the training. If those dates do not work SiteWatch may schedule the training for mid February or try to do a ZOOM training.

Marilyn Markel advises us that the annual SiteWatch conference is to be held on March 2, 2024, at the Los Luceros Historic Site near Santa Fe. Watch the GCAS website for details as they develop, or check with the web page for SiteWatch New Mexico.

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People, here's an opportunity to help our local grade school students do something important. Marilyn Markel needs GCAS volunteers to help at the Mimbres Culture Heritage Site on Wednesday, 9/13/2023, as 16 students from San Lorenzo’s third grade class train to be Junior Site Stewards. No experience necessary; Marilyn will show you the ropes. Contact Marilyn directly at 575-536-9337 to represent the GCAS in the Junior Site Steward program. The third graders will appreciate your help!

/s/ webmaster [photo is of past Junior Site Stewards - good kids, all of them]

The Mesa Prieta Petroglyph Project in Velarde, New Mexico, has produced a virtual tour of their extensive site that anyone can enjoy. You may have to navigate through one or two screens on this link, or perhaps this link, but it is worth a few minutes of your time to see glimpses of this very unique and important site. If you have never visited the site you will enjoy this brief introduction to it. If you have already visited in person you will be thrilled to see some of its highlights again.

Please also consider sending a donation to the MPPP to support their preservation efforts. Once it becomes feasible for public health you may consider visiting the site yourself. Plan a few days, as there are 6 different trails among the petroglyphs to sign up with a docent to see!

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The Santa Fe National Forest is looking for Archaeological Site Stewards for their area. Their training day is Saturday, March 21, 2020, so if the date and location fit your schedule, get busy now and sign up. They explain in their press release:

The second phase of our August 4, 2019, GCAS field trip found us traveling from the Microwave Site to examine the site at C-Bar Ranch. Like the Microwave Site, the C-Bar Ranch Site comprises some Late Period pithouses and the ruins of more recent pueblo rooms. And like Microwave, C-Bar is well known and convenient to locals and so continues to be heavily looted to this day.

The approach to the C-Bar site criss-crosses arroyos and passes rock outcrops hosting venerable prickly pear colonies. Abundant lichens on the rocks testify to the clean air which makes for a good, healthy walk (right photo).

Big photo on left up there shows all that that remains of the site's pueblo walls. Scattered by looters and people who either didn't know any better or didn't care.

The Microwave Site has no microwave tower. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It once had one.

This site in southwestern New Mexico is very well known to locals who have been camping here - and gathering potsherds and stones from pueblo walls - for many decades.

In July, 2019, professor Robert J. Stokes PhD of Eastern New Mexico University in Portales was Directing Archaeologist on an excavation of a small ruined structure located within the boundaries of City of Rocks State Park. The project's goals were to identify its walls, floors, and the overall nature of its construction to help determine its age and the purpose for which it had originally been built. Additionally Dr. Stokes sought to assess the context of the site within the surrounding landscape.

This here website has already introduced everyone to two up and coming members of the Aldo Leopold Charter School Youth Conservation Corps Archaeology Crew. These high school students learn eco-monitoring of sensitive sites as part of New Mexico's Junior SiteWatch program, work on trail crews, build gardens of heritage vegetables, and more. Some, like Serena Floyd and Isaiah Padilla, do all of that plus regularly teach groups of younger students about aspects of archaeology that range from hands-on experimental activities to the proper way to monitor an archaeological site. Here are Serena (far left) and Isaiah (purple shirt, center) in April, 2019, comfortably guiding a group of fifth grade students from Hurley Elementary School through a day's curriculum at the Mimbres Culture Heritage Site. Mentor Marilyn Markel (white shirt, center) can relax with these two in control.

We may not yet know what career path(s) Serena or Isaiah will take, but like their classmates they already demonstrate a commitment to public service and have acquired a number of skills that will be valuable to them in anything they put their minds to. Thanks, Serena and Isaiah!

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On April 26, 2019, Aldo Leopold Charter School Youth Conservation Corps Archaeology Crew Students presented a poster and gave a presentation at the Archaeological Society of New Mexico’s annual state meeting hosted by the Grant County Archaeological Society (GCAS). Over a hundred archaeologists and members of archaeological societies around New Mexico attended the meeting held in downtown Silver City, at the Murray Hotel. ALCS students, Will Scott (on the far right in the photo) and Serena Floyd (on the far left), along with their mentor, Marilyn Markel, spoke to the attendees about the importance of preserving and protecting archaeological sites like the Dragonfly Petroglyph Site on the Fort Bayard Game Refuge, Gila National Forest.