(April 6, 2021)—This time of year is generally filled with excitement as many of us at Archaeology Southwest prepare to present our current research at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA). Like so many other things, the meeting was cancelled last year due to COVID-19, and this year’s event shifted to an online meeting that’s coming up next week.
Despite the difficulty of in-person interactions this year, we’ve done work we’re really looking forward to sharing. For example, even though work on the Robinson Collection had to be adjusted to keep everyone safe, Jaye Smith and Jeff Clark found new ways to complete a research paper on that work, which they’ll be presenting next week.
I’m very excited for some of our 2019 field school alumni, who have tried to attend two in-person SAA meetings that couldn’t happen but persisted through these and other challenges and are presenting their work in this year’s new virtual setting. Chris Fuchs, James Margotta, and Sean White are all sharing results from their undergraduate theses next week, and I’m so happy to see the results of their hard work.
Here’s a brief list of presentations by Archaeology Southwest staff, students, and volunteers—we look forward to “seeing” some of you there. For our friends who won’t be attending the virtual meeting next week, we’ll post some of this work on our website later this month. We’re grateful to everyone who makes this work possible, including the National Science Foundation (NSF REU-1560465) for supporting our students’ participation and helping the next generation of archaeologists build a strong foundation in scientific research.
Christopher Caseldine, Political Water: Hohokam Irrigation and Sociopolitical Organization in Canal System 2, Lower Salt River Valley, Central Arizona
Christopher Fuchs, The Virtuous Archaeologist
James Margotta, The Forest for the Sites: Archaeological Heritage and Contestation in the Gila National Forest
Karen Schollmeyer, Animal Remains and Archaeological Context in the Mogollon Area, AD 1000–1450
Karen Schollmeyer and Jeffery Clark, organized poster session, Research Hot Off the Trowel in the Upper Gila and Mimbres Areas
Jaye Smith and Jeffery Clark, Citizen Science in Action: Preserving the Ray Robinson Collection from the Safford Basin, Arizona
Sean White, The Pithouse to Pueblo Transition, Mealing Facilities, and Mogollon Mimbres Society
Joshua Watts, cyberSW: A Preservation Archaeology Approach to a Web-based Southwest Regional Database