Southwest Symposium Reminder, Tucson Origins Park Planning, New Genetic Research on Peopling of New World

Southwestern Archaeology Making the News - A Service of the Center for Desert Archaeology

- Southwest Symposium Scheduled for January 17-19: 20th Anniversary Southwest Symposium,Movement, Connectivity, and Landscape Change, January 17-19, 2008. The Southwest Symposium was launched twenty years ago by Charles Redman and Paul Minnis to provide an opportunity for archaeologists to discuss current ideas and develop new networks for research in the American Southwest. From the beginning, this biennial symposium has been organized to explore a limited number of topics in substantial depth and to provide considerable time for discussion among all participants. The 2008 symposium will begin with a session that honors our 20th anniversary. In this opening session, the topics from the first Southwest Symposium (foraging, mobility and migration, social power and interaction, the protohistoric, and the history of Southwest archaeology) will be revisited by leading scholars in the field. They will look back over the last two decades of our accomplishments and forward toward new directions.
http://www.public.asu.edu/~ndwilso1

- The Impact of Genetic Diversity in the Peopling of the New World: Questions about human migration from Asia to the Americas have perplexed anthropologists for decades, but as scenarios about the peopling of the New World come and go, the big questions have remained. Do the ancestors of Native Americans derive from only a small number of “founders” who trekked to the Americas via the Bering land bridge? How did their migration to the New World proceed? What, if anything, did the climate have to do with their migration? And what took them so long?
http://www.cdarc.org/page/9utv - Science Daily

- Lecture on Four Corners Archaeology in Denver: Mark Varien will present "Four Corners, Then and Now", at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. Tuesday, October 30, 7:00 p.m. in the Ricketson Auditorium.

- Final Plans for Tucson Origins Park Presented at Open House: More than 100 people packed two meeting rooms Wednesday evening at the Tucson Convention Center for the fourth open house for Tucson Origins, where construction on a replica Mission San Agustín is set to start in January. "It's not just a master plan," Rio Nuevo director Greg Shelko said. "This is the pieces of the puzzle really coming together."
http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/ss/local/66855.php

- Tohono O'odham Nation to Assist Exhibit Development at Tucson Origins Heritage Park: The Tohono O’odham Nation has awarded more than $65,000 to the Arizona State Museum to support an internship and Native American consultations for the design of an exhibit in the Tucson Origins Heritage Park. The park, known as TOHP, is a significant part of the planned 30-acre cultural campus in downtown Tucson, and will be adjacent to several museums, including the Arizona State Museum, the University of Arizona Science Center, the Arizona History Museum and the Tucson Children’s Museum.
http://uanews.org/node/16588

- Visiting Besh-Be-Gowah: In its heyday, from about 1225 to 1400, the village of Besh-Ba-Gowah was home to 350 people - hunters, gatherers and remarkably sophisticated farmers who grew corn, squash, beans and cotton and other crops, irrigating when possible and dry farming when not. They understood flood-plain farming techniques.
http://www.cdarc.org/page/9umn - Arizona Republic

- Snowbowl Sewage case to get Second Review: Without comment, the full 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has agreed to review the findings of three of its judges rejecting a claim by Snowbowl that it would shut down if it does not get permission to use sewage to create artificial snow. The panel had concluded there is "no compelling governmental interest" in having artificial snow on the San Francisco Peaks - and specifically on the federal land where the operation is located.
http://www.cdarc.org/page/3n4w - The Arizona Republic