Free Online Talk: “Cíbola in Chacoan & Post-Chacoan Times” with Keith Kintigh, PhD.

Amerind Free Online Talk

Thursday, May 28, 2026

12:00 pm (AZ time)

To register, visit: https://bit.ly/Amerindonline05282026Kintigh

Please join us on Thursday, May 28, 2026 at 12:00 pm (AZ time) for a free online talk “Cíbola in Chacoan & Post-Chacoan Times” with Keith Kintigh, PhD.

 Since 1896, the ruins in Chaco Canyon have been a focus of Southwest archaeologists’ attention. However, the recognition of Chaco as a regional system with outliers and roads only began about 50 years ago.  Drawing on our limited excavations and extensive surveys over the last 45 years, I will discuss both the nature of the Chaco world and the regional consequences of Chaco’s collapse in the Cíbola area.  I’ll start with a discussion of the H-Spear site, a Chaco outlier we located south of the Zuni Indian Reservation.  While one might expect a nearby residential community, we found no contemporaneous occupation within .5 km of the great house; within 2km we located only 4 possibly contemporaneous room blocks with fewer than 20 rooms total. In contrast, 2.6km northwest of H-Spear, the post-Chacoan Hinkson Site has 32 residential room blocks with 525 rooms immediately surrounding a great house complex that includes an unroofed, oversize great kiva, a nazha, and roads. Using our excavations at and surveys around those two sites and the post-Chacoan great house site of Los Gigantes in the El Morro Valley, I’ll look at applying John Stein’s important idea of ritual landscapes, and the problematic concept of “community” over a period from AD1000-1275.

Keith Kintigh is Professor Emeritus of archaeology at Arizona State University.  His field research focused on the organization of ancestral Pueblo societies in the Cíbola area. Throughout his career, Kintigh published on quantitative methods and developed computer programs to address unusual analytical needs of archaeologists. To enhance preservation and access to the digital records of archaeological investigations, Kintigh led a team of archaeologists and computer scientists in creating tDAR (the Digital Archaeological Record), a sustainable repository for the digital records of archaeological investigations. Over the last 10 years, Kintigh led a different team of archaeologists and computer scientist to develop SKOPE a web application that provides free, high resolution paleoclimatic data. In 2017 Jeffrey Altschul and Kintigh led the establishment of the Coalition for Archaeological Synthesis (CfAS) to promote synthetic research in archaeology. Kintigh continues to serve on the board of tDAR, has an active NSF grant for SKOPE, and serves, with Altschul, as co-president of CfAS. Kintigh is a past president of the Society for American Archaeology and, for SAA, has worked extensively on national law and policy regarding the repatriation of Native American human remains. Kintigh earned a BA in Sociology and an MS in Computer Science at Stanford University in 1974 and a PhD in Anthropology at the University of Michigan in 1982. He received ASU’s award for Outstanding Doctoral Mentor for 2004. He was a Fulbright Fellow in Ireland in 2011.

We hope you will join us!

The Amerind will be at Celebrate the San Pedro at San Pedro House

Join us at the San Pedro House

9800 E. Highway 90 Sierra Vista, AZ.

Saturday, April 25th. 9:00 am – 2:00 pm

Free Event

Come out for a fun day celebrating the San Pedro with activities, speakers, booths, and more to entertain and educate on Nature and History of the area.

Join the Amerind on Saturday, April 25th from 9:00 am – 2:00 pm for the annual Celebrate the San Pedro event. This event is FREE and open to all. There will be activities, displays and speakers to entertain and educate about the natural and historical wonders of the San Pedro Riparian Conservation Area, of SPRNCA.

Amerind will be one of many booths where you can come and learn about the Amerind, pick up some free passes, and participate in an all ages, art activity with us. There will also be the annual team bird count competition!

We hope you come out and learn about the natural and cultural history of the area with us. The San Pedro House is located eight miles east of Sierra Vista on Highway 90. 9800 E. Highway 90 Sierra Vista, AZ.

Come celebrate the San Pedro!

Free Public Talk “Can Tomorrow’s AI Help Us Protect the Past?” with Dr. Jonathan Paige

Free Public Talk Saturday, March 7, 1-2 PM, Tucson
Can Tomorrow’s AI Help Us Protect the Past?
with Dr. Jonathan Paige
Presentation will be at the Tucson Museum of Art, 140 North Main Avenue
in the Alice Chaiten Baker Education Center

Archaeological sites are an irreplaceable part of our human heritage. How can we best protect them? How can we best find them? How can we learn from them?

The archaeological record represents over three million years of human behavior. However, it is challenging for us to integrate data and information from projects carried out by generations of researchers. The challenge of integrating data needs to be overcome if we are to synthesize information about the record, answer big questions about the human past, and protect the archaeological record itself.

Dr. Paige and a team of global researchers with the Coalition for Archaeological Synthesis are examining ways that Artificial Intelligence can help the archaeologists of tomorrow. Paige discusses the results of their group’s work, focusing on current approaches in using AI to protect and study the archaeological record, and their vision for how AI may be used in the future.

About the Speaker

Dr. Jonathan Paige is a Co-Director and Research Scientist with the Cultural Resource Sciences program, Center for Applied Fire and Ecosystem Science, New Mexico Consortium. He studies the evolution of technologies, the role they play in human evolution, and how groups adapt to new and challenging environments. He also works with federal agencies on advancing their capacity to perform comparative research through machine learning, developing models to identify archaeological sites on remote sensing imagery.

Photo Caption: Jonathan Paige analyzing material from Pitcairn Island at the Otago Museum, Dunedin, New Zealand. Photo courtesy of Jonathan Paige.

We hope you will join Amerind in Tucson!

Free Online Talk: “Life on the Edge of the Mimbres Region: Powers Ranch as a Mimbres Site” with Patricia Gilman & Mary Whisenhunt

Free Online Talk
Thursday, March 12, 2026
12:00 pm – 1:00 pm (AZ time)
“Life on the Edge of the Mimbres Region: Powers Ranch as a Mimbres Site” with Patricia Gilman, PhD & Mary Whisenhunt, PhD

To register, visit: https://bit.ly/Amerindonline03122026Gilman

Join us on Thursday, March 12, 2026 at 12:00 pm (AZ time) for an online talk, “Life on the Edge of the Mimbres Region: Powers Ranch as a Mimbres Site”, with Patricia Gilman, PhD and Mary Whisenhunt, PhD.

When people think of Mimbres archaeology, they picture beautiful black-on-white pottery with paintings of people and animals and large pueblo sites in the Mimbres Valley of southwestern New Mexico.  However, there were Mimbres sites beyond the Mimbres Valley, but they were different from those in the valley.  We explore what it meant to be Mimbres at the Powers Ranch site, a small settlement at the western edge of the Mimbres region. We conclude that the people at Powers Ranch were quintessentially Mimbres and were more closely affiliated with Mimbres settlements on the Gila River drainage in southeast Arizona and New Mexico than with those living in the Mimbres Valley core area.

Mary Whisenhunt received her anthropology doctorate in 2020, conducting her field work in southeast Arizona. Her research focused on the social resilience of precontact Indigenous people on the western boundary of the Mimbres region.

Patricia Gilman has done archaeological research in the Mimbres region for more than 50 years, retiring from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oklahoma. One of her research foci has been Mimbres beyond the Mimbres Valley.

We hope you will join us!

If you can’t join us to watch live on March 12th, register using an email and the recorded talk will be sent to you after the talk, to watch at your leisure.

 

Amerind Free Online Talk-Traceological Analysis of Turquoise Objects from Mesoamerica, Northern Mexico, and the American Southwest: Technological Styles and Interactions with Dr. Emiliano Ricardo Melgar Tísoc.

Amerind Free Online Talk

Thursday, December 4, 2025

12- 1 pm (AZ time)

To register, visit: https://bit.ly/Amerindonline12042025Tisoc

Traceological Analysis of Turquoise Objects from Mesoamerica, Northern Mexico, and the American Southwest: Technological Styles and Interactions with Dr. Emiliano Ricardo Melgar Tísoc.

There are thousands of turquoise objects found in different archaeological sites of Mesoamerica, Northern Mexico, and the American Southwest. Unfortunately, most of the researches about them had been focused on the symbolic meaning, its morphology, trade and use, but very few study their manufacturing traces. In this lecture, I will present a traceological approach to analyze and characterize their manufacturing techniques through the employment of Experimental Archaeology and Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM). The comparison of the turquoise assemblages from more than fifty sites located in these regions showed specific patterns related with lapidary traditions and technological styles. With this new data of the geography of the manufacturing techniques, it is possible to appreciate new nodes of interactions and trends of circulation of the turquoise pieces (raw materials, blanks, and finished objects) among the sourcing areas, the workshops, and the final consumers.

Dr. Emiliano Ricardo Melgar Tísoc earned a BA in Archaeology from the National School of Anthropology and History (ENAH) in Mexico and an MA and Ph.D. in Anthropology from National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Since 2004 he has been a full-time researcher at the Templo Mayor Museum. Dr Melgar’ research has been awarded the 2010 Alfonso Caso Award for best bachelor thesis in archaeology, the 2011 Teotihuacan Award for best essay on the materials of that city, and the 2019 Award of the Mexican Academy of Sciences for the best young researcher in the Mexican Humanities. He has written five books and more than 80 articles for domestic and foreign publications. His latest book, “Lapidary Objects from the Great Temple: Styles and Technological Traditions”, received the Honorable Mention in the 2024 INAH Prize for the best archaeological research in Mexico.

We hope you will spend your lunch with us learning about the incredible work of Dr. Melgar Tísoc!

*Unsure if you will be able to watch live? Register using an email and you will be sent a recording of the talk later that evening.

Amerind Free Online Talk-One Sherd at a Time: Seriating Ceramics from Paloparado, an Important Precolonial Site Near the Arizona/Sonora Border with Hunter Claypatch, PhD

Amerind Free Online Talk

Saturday, September 27, 2025

11:00 am (AZ time)

To register, visit: https://bit.ly/Amerindonline09272025Claypatch

Join us on Saturday, September 27, 2025 at 11:00 am (AZ time) for an online talk One Sherd at a Time: Seriating Ceramics from Paloparado, an Important Precolonial Site Near the Arizona-Sonora Border with Scholar Hunter Claypatch, PhD

The archaeological site of Paloparado is located within present-day Santa Cruz County, Arizona. It was excavated in the 1950s by Charles Di Peso and the Amerind Foundation. Although fundamental for reconstructing the occupational history of the Arizona-Sonora borderlands, the excavation was conducted with little prior knowledge of regional ceramics and many of Di Peso’s original interpretations have long been refuted. Through Amerind’s Emerging Scholar Residency, Claypatch applied ceramic insights that were unknown in the 1950s to conducted a systematic reanalysis of Paloparado’s pottery. Coupled with previously unpublished site data, this research reconstructs the occupational history of Paloparado and demonstrates the presence of largely unmixed Pre-Classic (pre-1150 CE) house deposits.

Hunter M. Claypatch received his Ph.D. from Binghamton University in 2022. He is a ceramicist who has worked extensively with precolonial pottery on both sides of the U.S. and Mexico international border. He specializes in Trincheras tradition of northern Sonora and the precolonial inhabitants of present-day Santa Cruz County, Arizona. His research applies traditional seriations, practice theory, and models for cultural connectivity to reconstruct Indigenous lifeways. He currently serves as president-elect for the Arizona Archaeological Council and as a professor at Pima Community College, in Tucson, Arizona.

We hope you will join us!

Amerind Free Online Talk: Comanches, Captives, Germans: Transactions on the Texas Frontier, 1847 with Daniel J. Gelo & Christopher J. Wickham

Free Online Talk

Comanches, Captives, Germans: Transactions on the Texas Frontier, 1847

with Daniel J. Gelo, PhD & Christopher J. Wickham, PhD

Saturday, June 22, 2024

11:00 am – Arizona Time 

In 2021, three finely worked sketches dating back to the middle of the nineteenth century were brought to the attention of scholars studying the relationship between German settlers and Comanche Indians. Seemingly the work of one artist, and (with one exception) never published, the sketches feature Comanches, Germans, a captive girl, a wagon train, the landscape and wildlife of the Texas Hill Country, and dynamic scenes of cultural contact. Who was the girl? Who were the Comanches involved? Who were the Germans? Where and when did this captive exchange take place? What do we make of the rich Indian and German cultural details that the artist includes? How can we understand his work—as art, as data about Comanche life and customs, and as documentation of a specific cultural encounter? And, of course, who was the artist, and how important is his work? Trying to find answers to these questions, the presenters will examine the drawings in detail and decode information placed by the artist.

Daniel J. Gelo is Dean and Professor of Anthropology Emeritus and former Stumberg Distinguished University Chair at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Gelo holds Ph.D., M.Phil., M.A., and B.A. degrees in anthropology from Rutgers University. His publications include: Comanche Vocabulary (University of Texas Press, 1995), Comanches in the New West, 1896-1908 (with Stanley Noyes, University of Texas Press, 1999), Texas Indian Trails (with Wayne L. Pate, Republic of Texas Press, 2003), Comanches and Germans on the Texas Frontier: The Ethnology of Heinrich Berghaus (with Christopher J. Wickham, Texas A&M University Press, 2018), and Indians of the Great Plains (Second Edition, Routledge, 2019). He has won the UTSA President’s Distinguished Achievement Award, the University of Texas System Chancellor’s Council Outstanding Teaching Award, and the Presidio La Bahia Award for best book on early Texas history.

Christopher J. Wickham is Professor Emeritus of German at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Having taught at the Universität Regensburg, Germany, Allegheny College, PA, and the University of Illinois at Chicago he moved to UTSA in 1991. Wickham retired from teaching in 2017. His research focuses on German literature and culture, and most recently on the interaction between German settlers and Comanches in 19th-century Texas. He authored a monograph on the dialect of Diendorf, Bavaria, (1987) and books on the notion of Heimat (1999) and Comanches and Germans in Texas (2018, with Daniel J. Gelo) which won the Presidio La Bahia Award for best book on early Texas history. Comanches, Captives, and Germans, a book coauthored with Dan Gelo, Hoppy Hopkins and Bryden Moon, appeared in January 2023. He is currently working with Dan Gelo on a study of 19th century Texas botanist and newspaperman Ferdinand Lindheimer.

Book Publication:

 Gelo, Daniel J., C. B. “Hoppy” Hopkins, Christopher J. Wickham, and Bryden Moon.

Comanches, Captives, and Germans: Wilhelm Friedrich’s Drawings from the Texas Frontier. Kerrville, TX: State House Press, 2022.

 https://www.tamupress.com/book/9781649670137/comanches-captives-and-germans/

To register for this free online event, visit: https://bit.ly/Amerindonline06222024GeloWickham