From the March 2003 Archaeological Record, Society for American Archaeology newsletter:

The Amerind Foundation and the Society for American Archaeology Initiates Annual Amerind Seminars

John A. Ware
Executive Director
Amerind Foundation, Inc.

The Amerind Foundation and the Society for American Archaeology are pleased to announce a new program entitled the Amerind Seminars. The Amerind Seminars will provide the opportunity for an outstanding symposium at the annual Society for American Archaeology meeting to reconvene six months later at the Amerind Foundation in Dragoon, Arizona, for an intensive five day seminar, the proceedings of which will be published in a new SAA-Amerind sponsored series through the University of Arizona Press.

The Amerind Seminars address an important need within the SAA. How many of us have joined a symposium and presented a paper at the annual meetings and were frustrated by the lack of opportunity for the entire panel to get together to exchange ideas, debate issues of mutual concern, and explore new avenues of interest and research? Except for casual discussions at the meetings and occasional follow up correspondence among panel members, there are few opportunities for such exchanges. Time constraints for sessions at the SAAs simply do not allow the kind of sustained interaction that occurs in a seminar over several days, and very few SAA symposia papers are assembled and edited for publication after the meetings. Beginning in 2004, the Amerind Seminars will provide just such an opportunity for a select SAA symposium. Here is how it will work.

When symposium organizers apply for a slot on the annual meeting agenda they will have the opportunity to check a box indicating their desire to be considered for an Amerind Seminar. All participating proposals will be forwarded to the Amerind Foundation where a review panel will evaluate symposia abstracts and participant lists and select five to ten finalists on the basis of the quality of individual and collective papers, timeliness of seminar topic, and potential contribution to the field of anthropological archaeology, irrespective of time period and geographic area of study. At the annual meeting members of the panel will attend all of the finalist symposia and at the end of the meeting select the outstanding symposium, which will receive an invitation to meet at the Amerind the following October. At the Amerind, seminar participants will meet for five days, present updated versions of their SAA papers, and engage in discussion and debate on a wide range of subjects relating to the symposium topic. Final drafts of papers and discussion narratives will be assembled in an edited volume that will be published by the University of Arizona Press in a new series dedicated to the Amerind Seminars. The Amerind Foundation will underwrite participant travel, food, and lodging costs, and will subvent the cost of publishing the final proceedings volume.

The Amerind Foundation is an ideal venue for seminars in anthropology and archaeology. Founded by William Shirley Fulton in 1937, the Amerind Foundation is a private, nonprofit (501(c)3) anthropology museum and research institute located 60 miles southeast of Tucson, Arizona, in the Little Dragoon Mountains. Amerind’s 1600 acre campus, located in the spectacular rock formations of Texas Canyon, is home to a museum, fine art gallery, curatorial facility, a 25,000 volume research library, facilities for visiting scholars, and a seminar house for advanced seminars in anthropology, archaeology, and Native American Studies that can accommodate up to fifteen scholars.

In its early years the Amerind was an active archaeological research center and its first professional director, Charlie Di Peso, conducted important surveys and excavations in southern Arizona and northern Mexico, culminating in the four-year Joint Casas Grandes Project in northern Chihuahua (Di Peso 1974). In recent years the Amerind has reexamined its mission and shifted emphasis from field research to synthesis. Since 1989 the Amerind has hosted nearly a dozen seminars on topics ranging from Hohokam prehistory (Gumerman 1991) to the analysis of prehistoric technology (Schiffer 2001) to analyzing the role that archaeology and anthropology have played in the development of nation states in the Western Hemisphere (Hinsley, Kohl, and Podgorny, in preparation). The Amerind Seminars will add a new and important dimension to Amerind’s professional seminar program, and Amerind’s partnership with the SAA will creatively combine the resources of a nonprofit archaeological organization and museum with the major archaeological professional organization in North America.

For more information, please contact the Amerind, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it   or 520.586.3666. To apply for an Amerind Seminar, session organizers need to check the appropriate box on the Session Abstract Form (Form E) when they submit a symposium proposal to SAA.

References Cited:

Di Peso, C. C.
1974 Casas Grandes: A Fallen Trading Center of the Gran Chichimeca, Vol. 1-3. Amerind Foundation Publications 9. Dragoon, Arizona.

Gumerman, G. J. (editor)
1991 Exploring the Hohokam: Prehistoric Desert Peoples of the American Southwest. Amerind Foundation New World Studies Seminar Series, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.

Hinsley, C., P. Kohl, and I. Podgorny (editors)
In Preparation The Naturalization of the Past: Nation-Building and the Development of Anthropology and Natural History in the Americas. Amerind Foundation New World Studies Seminar Series, University of Arizona Press, Tucson.

Schiffer, M. B. (editor)
2001 Anthropological Perspectives on Technology. Amerind Foundation New World Studies Seminar Series, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.