Southwest Archaeology Today for July 3, 2006

Archaeology Making the News – A Service of the Center for Desert Archaeology

– Brian Fagan Examines Archaeological Travelogues: If reporters write the first draft of history, explorers and archaeologists produce the first sketches of prehistory. Surveying a ruin before few suspected that anything existed there before, and until recently feeling free to carry off artifacts in the name of art and science, they have enjoyed the special privilege of nosing around remote places, from Petra to Mesa Verde, without a plane to catch. The idea behind this smart collection, edited by the anthropologist Brian Fagan, is that any number of visitors over the centuries to sites in the Middle East, Rome, Greece, China, Central Asia and Mexico have been in a broad sense archaeologists. Recorded accounts from any period, even if wrong-headed, form layers that can be profitably sifted.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/02/travel/02armchair.html

– Travelogue, Hopi, Zuni and Navajo Lands: Sunset brought the wall of traditional kachina dolls to life, row after row of carved spirit-messengers warmly lighted through the west window in Janice and Joseph Day’s gallery, perched on the rim of Second Mesa at Arizona’s Hopi Indian Reservation. When the golden glow faded, I took my leave and drove across the top of the mesa toward my room at the Hopi Cultural Center.
http://tinyurl.com/hmsdp – Miami Herald

– Excavations Resume at La Brea Tar Pits: The bone-digging season began Thursday in Los Angeles for paleontologists sifting through the world’s only active Ice Age excavation site in a major metropolitan area. Two months a year, scientists and volunteers descend 15 feet underground in the midst of Los Angeles, to remove, clean and catalogue a baffling array of Ice Age biodiversity at a site known as La Brea Tar Pits.
http://tinyurl.com/k25dy – Yahoo News

– Texas State University Field School Locates Archaic Tools and Trains Students: “What we’re interested in is the dynamic, but all we have is the static. Our job as archaeologists is to take the record and put it together as it was in the past,” Bousman said. “Archaeology is like an experiment that happened 8,000 or 6,000 years ago, and all we’re doing is recording those events.”
http://tinyurl.com/z3ex6 – KVUE News