Amerind Free Online Lecture – Contextualizing “Old” Museum Collections: The Case of Obsidian “Mirrors” at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian

obsidian tablet being examined

Contextualizing “Old” Museum Collections: The Case of Obsidian “Mirrors” at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian with Maria M. Martinez, PhD and Michael Brandl, PhD

Amerind Free Online Lecture

Contextualizing “Old” Museum Collections: The Case of Obsidian “Mirrors” at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian with Maria M. Martinez, PhD and Michael Brandl, PhD

Saturday, August 6, 2022, 11:00 am – Arizona Time

Sponsored by Desert Diamond Casinos

Anthropological museum collections are an important resource for academic and community-centered research. However, many museum collections have minimal or even lack contextual information. This study exhibits some of the protocols for consulting Indigenous heritage in museum settings and overcomes the challenges related to collections-based research. Recent studies of rectangular polished obsidian items found within museum collections have indicated that these objects were made by Mexican Indigenous artisans during the colonial period for European consumption. Nev­ertheless, much of this research was not well-grounded within the discipline of anthro­pology and therefore did not fully address the potential cultures or communities that manufactured these items and the Indigenous and colonial intersections under which they were produced and consumed. We interweave archaeological analytical techniques, provenance and techno-morphological analysis, including experimental archaeology with pre-Columbian archaeological studies, Mesoamerican art and iconogra­phy, and historical sources to identify the culture(s) that manufactured rectangular obsidian tablets in the context of Indigenous and colonial entanglements in Mexico. This study in collections-based research contributes to the restoration of ancestral intel­lectual knowledge and labor to Indigenous peoples that were erased through the process of coloniality, including museum practices of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Maria M. Martinez is associate curator of collections and exhibits at the Amerind Foundation, Inc. She served as a program special­ist for research and collections access at the Smithsonian Institu­tion, National Museum of the American Indian, for five years. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin in 2013. She continues her research in Maya archae­ology as a research fellow at the University of Texas at Austin and with lithic provenance studies at the Austrian Archaeologi­cal Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences. Her research interests are collections-based community-centered research, Indigenous stewardship of museum collections, Mesoamerican archaeology, lithic raw material provenance studies (chert and obsidian), eco­nomic archaeology (mechanisms of exchange, distribution, and consumption), household archaeology, craft production, and con­temporary and ancient Maya ritual practices.

Michael Brandl is researcher and coordinator of Archaeological Sciences at the Austrian Archaeological Institute (OeAI) at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and lecturer at the University of Vienna, Austria. He received his PhD at the Institute of Prehistoric and Historical Archaeology of the University of Vienna. He developed the “Multi-Layered Chert Sourcing Approach” for lithic provenance studies combining petrographic analyses and geochemistry. His main research interests are lithic raw material and economic analyses.

This online program is free, but space is limited. To register, visit: https://bit.ly/AmerindOnline080622

Amerind Free Online Lecture – Casas Grandes Clothing and Identity with Christine VanPool, PhD

Christine S. VanPool

Casas Grandes Clothing and Identity with Christine VanPool, PhD

Amerind Free Online Lecture

Casas Grandes Clothing and Identity with Christine VanPool, PhD

Saturday, July 9, 2022, 11:00 am – Arizona Time

Sponsored by Desert Diamond Casinos

Medio Period Casas Grandes human effigies portray males and females in different stances and types of clothing. These variances reflect aspects of Casas Grandes gender roles, identity, and ritual. Join Dr. Christine S. VanPool (University of Missouri) as she examines these differences and provides insight into Casas Grandes culture. VanPool has written extensively on Casas Grandes and Southwestern archaeology, iconography, religion, and archaeological method and theory.

Christine S. VanPool grew up in Ruidoso, New Mexico. She earned her B.S. in anthropology at Eastern New Mexico University and her M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of New Mexico.  In 2006 she joined the anthropology faculty at the University of Missouri, Columbia. Over the last 20 years, her main research focus has been on archaeological method and theory as it pertains to religion and pottery symbolism in the Casas Grandes world.  Since 2007 she has been co-directing museum and field projects with Todd L. VanPool in Northern Mexico and southern Arizona and New Mexico.  She is the author or editor of five books and numerous articles.

This online program is free, but space is limited. To register, visit: https://bit.ly/AmerindOnline070922

Amerind Free Online Lecture – Prehistoric Moche Politics and Food Along Peru’s North Coast with George “Wolf” Gumerman, PhD

George “Wolf” Gumerman

Amerind Free Online Lecture

Prehistoric Moche Politics and Food Along Peru’s North Coast with George “Wolf” Gumerman, PhD

Saturday, July 23, 2022, 11:00 am – Arizona Time

Sponsored by Desert Diamond Casinos

Join Dr. George “Wolf” Gumerman, PhD as he examines one of the most socially and economically important components of Peru’s Moche culture–the food system. Because food is incredibly social, it reflects sociopolitical organization. Food related data from Moche sites indicate the relative independence and self-sufficiency of Moche households and communities, suggesting a decentralized sociopolitical organization rather than a centralized authority with control over production, distribution, and consumption.

Dr. George “Wolf” Gumerman was the Founding Dean of the Honors College and Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Northern Arizona University. Wolf has a strong interest in food and culture stemming from his 20 years of research on the north coast of Peru and from his interest in sustainable food systems. Wolf often applies his archaeological research to broader societal concerns, including collaborating with the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office to promote cultural preservation. Using archaeology and elder knowledge he worked to connect Hopi youth with their past. The collaboration produced four films and a museum exhibit that present the youth’s perspective on Hopi culture and history.  He is Co-founder and past Co-editor for the Journal Heritage Management and publishes primarily on topics related to prehistoric foodways. Wolf has taught a range of interactive courses on composition and literature, archaeology, theory, human evolution and food and culture. He is a Board Member for Friends of the Flagstaff Area National Monuments and also for the Arizona Chapter of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers.

To register, visit: https://bit.ly/AmerindOnline072322

Free Online Lecture: Macaws and Parrots in the Ancient Southwestern United States and Northwestern Mexico with Pat Gilman, PhD, Steve Plog, PhD, and Christopher W. Schwartz, PhD

Macaws and Parrots in the Ancient Southwestern United States and Northwestern Mexico

Amerind Free Online Lecture

Macaws and Parrots in the Ancient Southwestern United States and Northwestern Mexico with Pat Gilman, PhD, Steve Plog, PhD, and Christopher W. Schwartz, PhD

Saturday, May 21, 2022, 11:00 am – Arizona Time

Sponsored by Desert Diamond Casinos

The multiple, vivid colors of scarlet macaws and their ability to mimic human speech are key reasons macaws were and are significant to the Native peoples of the U.S. Southwest and Mexican Northwest. Scarlet macaws are native to tropical forests ranging from the Gulf Coast and southern regions of Mexico to Bolivia. Surprisingly, they are present at numerous archaeological sites in the U.S. Southwest and Mexican Northwest (SW/NW), but yet they are absent at the vast majority. Although these birds have been noted and marveled at through the decades, new syntheses of early excavations, new analytical methods, and new approaches to understanding the past now allow us to explore the significance and distribution of scarlet macaws to a degree that was previously impossible.  Three leading experts explore what we currently know about the scarlet macaws from archaeological sites in the SW/NW.

Pat Gilman has done archaeological field work and research in the Mimbres region of southwestern New Mexico and southeastern Arizona for more than 45 years.  Her initial interest was architecture and the transition from people living in pithouses to inhabiting pueblos.  Recently, Dr. Gilman and her colleagues have investigated the presence of scarlet macaws in Mimbres sites, their DNA and dates, and how and why they might have been brought to the southwestern United States ultimately from the tropical forest of southern Mexico.  With Christopher Schwartz and Stephen Plog, she has co-edited a book, Birds of the Sun: Macaws and People in the U.S. Southwest and Mexican Northwest,” that has recently been published.

Steve Plog is Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia. His recent work has focused on Chaco Canyon beginning with a decade-long project to build a digital archive, the Chaco Research Archive (www.chacoarchive.org), to digitize and integrate information on the early excavations (1896-1927) in the Chaco, information that was scattered among many museums and repositories. More recently Steve has collaborated with several colleagues to study the 42 scarlet macaws recovered during excavations in Chaco, primarily at Pueblo Bonito. He is a co-editor of Birds of the Sun: Macaws and People in the U.S. Southwest and Mexican Northwest.

Christopher W. Schwartz is a Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Northern Arizona University and lead editor of Birds of the Sun: Macaws and People in the U.S. Southwest and Mexican Northwest. He is an anthropological archaeologist who works on field- and collections-based projects in the U.S. Southwest and Mexico. His research draws on various lines of evidence, including faunal skeletal material, isotopic analyses, material culture, Indigenous perspectives, and spatial analyses, to understand how interregional interaction and human-animal relationships effected large-scale social transformations in the past.

This online program is free, but space is limited. To register, visit: https://bit.ly/AmerindOnline052122

This program is sponsored by Desert Diamond Casinos.

Free Online Lecture – A New Theory of the Maya Collapse: It Didn’t Happen with Anne Pyburn, PhD

Photo of Anne Pyburn

A New Theory of the Maya Collapse: It Didn’t Happen with Anne Pyburn, PhD

Amerind Free Online Lecture – A New Theory of the Maya Collapse: It Didn’t Happen with Anne Pyburn, PhD

Saturday, December 4, 2021, 11:00 am – Arizona Time

In an attempt to make their work relevant to the present and supportive of valuable political understandings, archaeologists have often tried to interpret their findings as providing “lessons from the past.” Usually these have something to do with a concern for the results of overpopulation or environmental destruction in the present. Many have assumed that showing how human error in the past led to starvation, suffering and collapse would impel people in the present to make better choices.

The results of these efforts have been negligible for social change, but unfortunately, constructing the ancestral cultures of Indigenous groups as wasteful, violent, political failures has had demonstrable negative consequences. This is particularly the case for living Maya people whose plight in the world today continues to be ignored, as their history is continuously used as a cautionary tale for humanity. People are shocked to learn that there are over eight million Maya speakers alive today, many of whom are still struggling to overcome the genocide of the Guatemalan civil war.

In this talk Anne Pyburn, PhD will cast the history of Maya speaking peoples in a different light and turn the “lessons from the past” upside down to expose the brilliant, creative, highly developed civil society, and astonishing sustainable economic strategies of Maya cultures. She will show how a well-intentioned misrepresentation of the past has not only undermined Maya sovereignty in the present but is teaching exactly the wrong lessons from the past. The “Maya collapse” lessons are not only inaccurate, they miss the points about resilience and land rights that could have real impact on the modern world, by challenging the history of the destructive forces that are made to seem inevitable in traditional archaeological stories about the Maya past.

Anne Pyburn is Provost’s Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington, and she holds her degrees from the University of Arizona, Tucson (Ph.D. and M.A.), and Reed College (B.A.).  Her geographic areas of specialization are Mesoamerica (Belize) and Central Asia (Kyrgystan), with research interests that include archaeology, settlement patterns, the Maya, gender, ethics, as well as archaeology and social content.  She is the Director of the Belize Service Learning Project for Wells Scholars, and Co-Director of the research project at Aygergel II, Naryn, Kyrgyzstan.  She has written and presented widely, and her published works include “Collision or Collaboration: Archaeology Encounters Economic Development” (co-editor with P.G. Gould).

This Online program is free, but space is limited. To register visit: https://bit.ly/AmerindOnline120421

Free Online Lecture Via Zoom: Migration: A View from the Southwest with Catherine M. Cameron, PhD

Free Online Lecture Via Zoom:

Migration: A View from the Southwest with Catherine M. Cameron, PhD

Saturday, July 18, 2020, 11:00 am, Arizona time

The Southwest is full of ancient places – empty towns and villages. Where did people go and why? Perhaps because of its remarkably preserved sites, migration has been of long-standing interest to Southwestern archaeologists and others. This talk will explore the post-13th century Southwestern migrations and the variety of ways that migrants expressed their identity in their new homes. I will then move beyond the Southwest to argue that movement was frequent for people living ancient small-scale societies and that to understand movement in these early times we need new models of how and why people moved.

Dr. Catherine Cameron is a professor emerita with the University of Colorado, Boulder. An archaeological leader in the Americas, Professor Cameron has worked in Chaco Canyon, northeastern Arizona, and southeastern Utah.

This online program is free, but space is limited.
To register visit: https://bit.ly/AmerindOnline071820