Archaeology

Dr. Jamie Hodgkins’ archaeology and biological anthropology students are presenting their thesis projects at the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) and Paleoanthropology Society meetings in Denver this spring! All got a trial run by unveiling their posters at the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences’ annual Research and Creative Works...

Sarah Manassee did fieldwork in Las Animas County with PaleoCultural Research Group last summer, helping the crew perform surveys, site documentation, and an excavation. Most recently, she presented her thesis at the Council of Professional Archaeologists’ annual meeting in Grand Junction and will present new thesis research at the Paleoanthropology...

Sanjuana (“SJ”) Casillas Chavez is currently working on his master’s thesis, which focuses on a zooarchaeological analysis of the Jones-Miller site, a 10,000-year-old bison butchery site of the now-extinct species, Bison antiquus. This assemblage is housed at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and yielded approximately 41,000 bison bones...

In his eye-catching blog , Kyle Pontieri documents the 2024 excavation season at Boomplaas Cave in South Africa, detailing the experiences of the archaeological team during their fieldwork. Boomplaas Cave, located in the foothills of the Swartberg Mountains in the Klein-Karoo region, has been in use for potentially 80,000 years...

Helen Maria Olson is conducting a preliminary pXRF analysis of an unusual obsidian artifact from Los Guachimontones, Mexico. Her research aims to determine the object’s sourcing and cultural significance, suggesting it may have been highly valued for special occasions.

In an article in Scientific Reports , Dr. Jamie Hodgkins and colleagues created a digital reconstruction of a 10,000-year-old infant burial in an Italian cave, allowing researchers to examine the site as it was before excavation. She described how the use of digital twin technology in archaeology has had a...

Dr. Christopher Beekman recently contributed to Collecting Mesoamerican Art Before 1940 (Getty Research Institute, 2024), in which he discussed the history of looting and trafficking antiquities out of western Mexico. Members of the art community shaped the market for these objects around a “brand” that appealed to specifically West Coast...