Category: Fossils & Ruins

The Archaeology Channel interviews SMU’s Fred Wendorf

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date July 16, 2009

The remarkable 60-year-career of internationally recognized field archaeologist Fred Wendorf, SMU Henderson-Morrison Professor of Prehistory Emeritus, is the subject of an interview with Richard Pettigrew, president and executive director of the nonprofit Archaeological Legacy Institute.

Pettigrew interviewed Wendorf for The Archaeology Channel, exploring Wendorf’s productive career: Founding the Fort Burgwin Research Center in New Mexico, now The Archaeological Field School at SMU-in-Taos; founding SMU’s Department of Anthropology; and leading the Combined Prehistoric Expedition in the Sahara Desert from 1962 to 1999, the longest international prehistoric expedition in northeastern Africa.

A collection of artifacts from the expedition are housed in The Wendorf Collection of The British Museum.

Listen to the interview

Excerpt:

Dr. Fred Wendorf came of age and began his career during a formative period in American archaeology. But after leaving his permanent mark on the development of archaeology in the American Southwest and the United States, he essentially founded the study of the prehistoric eastern Sahara, beginning with the Aswan Dam Project in the Nile River Valley.

His life, nearly ended by a bullet on a WWII battlefield in Italy, has included an archaeological research career spanning six decades and an unsurpassed record of seminal contributions.

His recently published book, Desert Days: My Life as a Field Archaeologist, is a record not only of a life, but of an epoch in the history of archaeology on two continents.

This is history he not just witnessed, but to a significant degree he created it through his innovative approaches and endless energy, which should serve as an inspiration to subsequent generations of archaeologists.

Dr. Richard Pettigrew of ALI interviewed Dr. Wendorf for The Archaeology Channel on two separate occasions, first in person at the Society for American Archaeology Conference in Atlanta on April 24, 2009, and then over the telephone on June 9, 2009.

Guided by Dr. Wendorf’s book, this interview covers a wide array of topics, including his role in the creation of the first truly large contract archaeology projects in the United States, his momentous and very fruitful decision to launch a field expedition in the Nile River Valley against the wishes and advice of others, and the contributions of his research toward the understanding of human cultural development.

Personal anecdotes combine with long considered assessments to paint a genuine picture of his life and career and the era they have spanned.

Listen to the interview

Tags Dedman College, Fred Wendorf, SMU Department of Anthropology, SMU-in-Taos

Culture, Society & Family Fossils & Ruins

New research partnership at The Archaeology Field School at SMU-in-Taos

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date July 15, 2009

The Archaeology Field School at SMU-in-Taos begins a unique education and research partnership this summer with students and faculty from Mercyhurst College in Erie, Pa., uniting two of the nation’s leading archaeology programs on Southern Methodist University’s New Mexico campus.

“This collaboration will create one of the strongest archaeology field training programs in the nation, if not the world,” said Mike Adler, SMU-in-Taos executive director. “It leverages the strengths of both institutions.”

SMU%20Taos%20entrance%20w%20bicyclists.jpg The goal of the Taos Collaborative Archaeology Program (TCAP) is to unite the strengths of SMU’s community-based archaeology and Mercyhurst’s excavation, documentation and analytical protocols to offer students an unparalleled archaeological training experience.

The SMU-in-Taos campus is sited on an archaeological treasure trove in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains within the Carson National Forest. Program participants have ready access to the restored Fort Burgwin, a pre-Civil War U.S. Cavalry cantonment, and the 13th-century Pot Creek Pueblo. The campus is located on New Mexico Highway 518 between Ranchos de Taos and Penasco. Open archaeological excavations on the SMU-in-Taos campus include the Laundresses Quarters.

SMU%20students%20at%20Taos%20dig%20site.jpg The first TCAP session was June 1 through July 15, and joined 12 students from SMU with 16 from Mercyhurst. SMU’s TCAP director is Sunday Eiselt, assistant professor of anthropology, and Mercyhurst field directors are Judith Thomas, a historic archeologist, and Joseph Yedlowski, a prehistoric archeologist.

SMU is now in its fourth decade of offering field archaeology at the Taos campus, and Adler estimates more than 1,000 undergraduate and graduate students have trained there.

“We have a lot to learn from each other,” Thomas said. “SMU is very strong in community-based archaeology and they have a top facility at which to study. We provide an intense, hands-on field archaeology experience using state-of-the art technology.”

SMU%20Taos%20site%20specimens.jpg The Mercyhurst group is supplying a new remote sensing device known as a gladiometer that works in tandem with computer software to detect features and structures buried at shallow depths, to generate subsurface maps and to better target excavation efforts.

The students will excavate at the Ranchos de Taos Plaza in the shadow of the historic San Francisco de Asis church, and in the homes and backyards of Ranchos de Taos residents whose willingness to work with SMU is a hallmark of the program. Students will also take part in the annual mudding of the church and will record rock art near the spectacular Rio Grande Gorge.

SMU%20Taos%20students%20in%20library.jpg SMU-in-Taos has offered summer education programs tailored to the region’s unique resources since 1973, but the rustic campus dormitories were impractical for use during colder weather. New construction, recent renovations to housing and technological improvements provided through a $4 million lead gift from former Texas Gov. William P. Clements and his wife, Rita, will allow SMU students to take a full semester of classes for the first time this fall.

Other donors have given more than $1 million to support the student housing. They include Dallas residents Roy and Janis Coffee, Maurine Dickey, Richard T. and Jenny Mullen, Caren H. Prothro and Steve and Marcy Sands; Bill Armstrong and Liz Martin Armstrong of Denver; Irene Athos and the late William J. Athos of St. Petersburg, Fla.; Jo Ann Geurin Thetford of Graham, Texas; and Richard Ware and William J. Ware of Amarillo, Texas. — Kim Cobb (Mercyhurst College contributed to this report)

Tags B. Sunday Eiselt, Dedman College, Mercyhurst Archaeological Institute, SMU Archaeology Field School, SMU Department of Anthropology, SMU-in-Taos, Taos Collaborative Archaeology Program

Events Fossils & Ruins Researcher news

Uncovering Angola’s ancient giants: Louis Jacobs’ presentation

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date July 6, 2009

Fossil finds in the rock outcrops of the coast of Angola in Africa are a “museum in the ground,” according to SMU vertebrate paleontologist Louis L. Jacobs.

Internationally recognized for his fossil discoveries, Jacobs and a team of researchers have unearthed fossils in the outcrops from Namibe, at the southern end of Angola’s coast, to Cabinda, at the northern end.

Jacobs’ work in Angola is jointly funded by the Petroleum Research Fund and National Geographic Society. He’ll present details July 9 at the monthly meeting of the Angola Field Group in Luanda.

A professor in Dedman College‘s Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Jacobs joined SMU’s faculty in 1983. Currently he has projects in Mongolia, Angola and Antarctica. His book, “Lone Star Dinosaurs” (1999, Texas A&M University Press) was the basis of an exhibit at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History that traveled the state. He is consulting on a new exhibit, Mysteries of the Texas Dinosaurs, which is set to open in the fall of 2009.

From the Angola Field Group’s blog:

The Angola Field Group invites you to: Uncovering the Hidden Remains of Angola’s Ancient Giants, a presentation this Thursday, July 9, at 8:00 p.m. at the Viking Club with dinosaur hunter Dr. Louis Jacobs who calls the fossils of Angola a “museum in the ground.”

Dr. Jacobs and his team first came to Angola in 2005 and again in 2007 to hunt for fossils of giant marine lizards first reported in the 1960’s, but they unearthed much more than that. He will present a review of their finds from the rock outcrops of the coast of Namibe province all the way up to the coast of Cabinda, conducted in cooperation with Agostinho Neto University and ISPRA University in Lubango.

Dr. Jacobs teaches geology and paleontology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas and has conducted fieldwork worldwide. He’s internationally recognized as a dinosaur expert and six fossil species have been named after him.

Read the full entry.

Tags Dedman College, Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Louis L. Jacobs

Culture, Society & Family Earth & Climate Fossils & Ruins Researcher news

National Academy of Sciences: “Peopling of the Americas” researcher awarded highest honor

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date April 28, 2009

An SMU archaeologist whose work centers on how people first came to inhabit North America has been elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). David Meltzer, chair of SMU’s Department of Anthropology, has been elected a member of the NAS in recognition for his achievements in original scientific research.

david-meltzer

Meltzer’s work looks at the origins, antiquity, and adaptations of the first Americans. Paleoindians colonized the North American continent at the end of the Ice Age. Meltzer focuses on how these hunter-gatherers met the challenges of moving across and adapting to the vast, ecologically diverse landscape of Late Glacial North America during a time of significant climate change.

Membership in the NAS is one of the highest honors given to a scientist or engineer in the United States.

The Henderson-Morrison Professor of Prehistory in Dedman College, Meltzer will be the third SMU professor to be inducted into the NAS. All three have come from the University’s highly regarded anthropology department. Meltzer is also director of QUEST Archaeological Research Program.

Meltzer was elected April 28 along with 71 other scientists, joining more than 2,000 active NAS members. More than 180 living Academy members have won Nobel Prizes. NAS members have included Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, Thomas Edison, Orville Wright, and Alexander Graham Bell.

“It’s really an honor to be in that wonderful company,” Meltzer said shortly after being notified of his selection by phone. “I am thrilled, excited, shocked, humbled. It’s a great day.” He said he was particularly touched that the NAS members who voted him in then passed a cell phone around to offer their individual congratulations.

“David Meltzer serves as the model of a professor whose research contributes to his discipline and our understanding of civilization, and who uses that knowledge to enliven his classroom,” said SMU President R. Gerald Turner. “His election to the NAS brings much-deserved recognition to Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences and honor to SMU.”

“One of the hallmarks of top universities is the election of their faculty to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences,” said Paul Ludden, university provost and vice president for academic affairs. “SMU is so proud of its top-tier anthropology faculty member, David Meltzer, for his election today.”

Meltzer’s archaeology and history research has been supported by grants from the National Geographic Society, the National Science Foundation, The Potts and Sibley Foundation and the Smithsonian Institution. In 1996, he received a research endowment from Joseph and Ruth Cramer to establish the Quest Archaeological Research Program at SMU, which will support in perpetuity research on the earliest occupants of North America.

His research has appeared in more than 130 publications, and Meltzer has written or edited half a dozen books, including “First People in a New World: Colonizing Ice Age Americans,” recently published by The University of California Press. He received his Ph.D in anthropology/archaeology from the University of Washington in Seattle and joined the faculty at SMU in 1984.

Two emeritus faculty members in SMU’s Anthropology Department are also NAS members: Lewis Binford was elected to the NAS in 2001 and Fred Wendorf was elected in 1987. Only an Academy member may submit formal nominations to the NAS, and supporting nomination materials and candidate lists remain confidential. The evaluation process occurs throughout the year, culminating in a final ballot at the Academy’s annual meeting in April.

The National Academy of Sciences is a private, nonprofit honorific society of distinguished scholars engaged in scientific and engineering research, dedicated to the furthering science and technology and to their use for the general welfare. Established in 1863, the National Academy of Sciences has served to “investigate, examine, experiment, and report upon any subject of science or art” whenever called upon to do so by any department of the government.

HOW I BECAME AN ARCHAEOLOGIST

David Meltzer said that although he had told it many times, this story first appeared in print in “The Dallas Morning News” on Dec. 24, 2001. Photo shows him (below) on his first day in the field in June 1971.

One June day after school let out (I had just finished 10th grade), my mother asked me what my plans were for the summer. I told her I hoped to slouch on the couch and watch television.

“That,” she announced, “isn’t good enough.” She showed me a piece in The Washington Post (our local newspaper) about excavations beginning in a week’s time in the nearby Shenandoah Valley, at the recently-discovered Thunderbird Paleoindian site.

“Would you like to join the group?”

“Sure,” I said, figuring at that late date the university’s plans must already be set and they couldn’t possibly want to take some snotty high school kid. I went back to watching My Favorite Martian.

Never underestimate your mother.

A day later she’d made fast friends with the administrative assistant at the office, who then talked the project director — Bill Gardner, of Catholic University — into taking me on. He wasn’t so keen on my being there, either! That was over 30 years ago. I went on to excavate for four consecutive seasons at the Thunderbird and nearby Fifty site, and I’ve been doing archaeology ever since.

I’m not sure why that newspaper story caught my mother’s eye, or why she thought her son would enjoy the experience. And I’m certain she didn’t imagine it would set me on a career. But I guess that’s just a mother’s gift, now, isn’t it?

Tags David Meltzer, Dedman College, National Academy of Sciences, SMU Department of Anthropology

Culture, Society & Family Fossils & Ruins Student researchers

Dig at 16th-century site explores impact of Inca’s empire-building

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date April 25, 2009

A 16th century estate in Peru will offer insight into how expanding empires subjugate people and appropriate their resources to promote a cause. Kylie Quave, an SMU graduate student in archaeology, has received a prestigious Fulbright U.S. Student Fellowship to conduct archaeological fieldwork and research in southeastern Peru, the heart of the ancient Inca empire.

The 10-month fellowship begins in August 2009. During that time, Quave intends to excavate residences on the estate of 16th-century emperor Huayna Capac. She hopes to shed light on the Inca elites who lived there and supervised the estate’s daily operations, immigrant laborers and land, which had been appropriated by the nobility.

“The Incas transformed the rural landscape around their capital into immense sources of private wealth,” Quave says. “I hope to contribute to a global understanding of how empires use people and resources to promote their cause and how local communities respond to the imperial campaign.”

During her fellowship, Quave will collaborate with local archaeologists in the field and laboratory, along with local historians in regional and national archives.

With experience as an SMU teaching assistant and as a researcher and docent for the Dallas Museum of Art, she also plans to work with the local community to create educational programming for children and adults.

“We will bring together our diverse perspectives to understand how the Inca developed private investments in the rural heartland using a multiethnic labor force,” she says. “The community will be involved in the preservation of its past.”

Quave, a native of Brooksville, Florida, earned her Bachelor’s degree in art history in 2005 from Emory University. In SMU’s Dedman College, where Quave earned her Master’s degree in 2008, she has taken courses in archaeological method and theory, and previously has done fieldwork in Bolivia and Peru.

“Kylie’s dissertation will move beyond well-known Inca country palaces like Machu Picchu, developing valuable perspectives on how royal families developed and managed private resources that were key to the economic maintenance of the largest native civilization to develop in the Americas,” says Alan Covey, assistant professor of anthropology and Quave’s dissertation adviser. “Her success is the latest for SMU’s doctoral program in anthropology, which recruits talented students and prepares them to make a professional impact early in their careers.”

Graduate student Amanda Aland was awarded a Fulbright in 2008, also to conduct archaeological fieldwork and research in Peru.

Quave is one of 1,450 U.S. citizens selected to study abroad this year through the U.S. State Department’s Fulbright Student Program. More than 40 SMU students have been awarded the fellowship in the last 35 years. — Sarah Hanan

Tags Alan Covey, Amanda Aland, Dedman College, Kylie Quave, SMU Department of Anthropology