Southwest Archaeology Today for July 3, 2005

Archaeology making the news — a service of the Center for Desert Archaeology.

– Director of Western New Mexico University Museum Begins Reexamination of Mogollon Highland Ceramics (Silver City): Cynthia Ann Bettison, Ph.D., has begun an administrative sabbatical leave for four months to visit the Logan Museum in Beloit, Wisc., the Arizona State Museum and the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, in addition to the Field Museum. Bettison will make the visits in order to examine and reanalyze ceramic collections and documentation from archaeological projects from the 1940s to 1970s which took place in west-central new Mexico and east-central Arizona.
http://www.scsun-news.com/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi?archive=722&num=6279

– The Santa Cruz Valley in 1776: Tom Sheridan’s essay in the Az. Daily Star.
http://www.dailystar.com/dailystar/allheadlines/82423.php

– The Role of Film In Anthroplogical Interpretation:Anthropologists go to amazing places and hear wonderful stories. And when they come back, they have the job of sharing what they have learnt with others. But the force of film and TV has been such as to cause anthropology to lose its rightful and essential place. As a result, tribal and indigenous peoples are all too often returned to their primitive appearances, struggles against colonial invasion and oppression go unreported or are crudely simplified, and audiences are encouraged to see the “primitive” through the eyes of a presenter whose ignorance is supposed to be rendered acceptable by some degree of celebrity.
http://tinyurl.com/dza8r

– New Director of the Casa Grande Historical Society: Jolanta “Jo” Macek recently has had two things she is very happy about – moving to Arizona and getting a job as director of the Casa Grande Valley Historical Society.
http://tinyurl.com/c22df

– Historic Preservation (Phoenix): A little over a week after the Phoenix City Council endorsed bulldozing Madison Square Garden, community activists said they’ll continue to fight for historic designation for the arena while keeping close tabs on the project to ensure that the developer abides by the city’s orders.
http://tinyurl.com/9usfq

– Museum News: Museum attendance in the United States continues to grow.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0701/p12s01-alar.html

– Genetic Archaeology: Thousands of possible scenarios must be considered to pinpoint the ancestry of a single gene. Durand, a biology and computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University since 2000, has designed a new software tool called “Notung” to make it faster and easier to dig through the molecular ruins — a nascent field known as genetic archaeology.
http://pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/s_349724.html