Society for American Archaeology Meetings - Austin, TX 2007

I'm very pleased to note that a number of CSULB graduate students will be presenting at this year's SAA meetings in Austin, TX. This is the "world series" of archaeology meetings and it is quite rewarding to know that our students are up to (and, surpass!) the professional standards of the discipline. Here are the CSULB papers/posters for 2007 (student names in bold):

• Veronica Harper, Hector Neff and Carl Lipo—Basalt Artifact Sourcing on Easter Island
• Kristin Safi, Carl Lipo, Terry Hunt and Sergio Rapu—Geophysical Explorations and Sequences of Monumental Architecture at the Anakena Dune of Easter Island
• Roberta Thomas, Hector Neff and Carl Lipo—The Sourcing of Stemmed Obsidian Bifaces on Easter Island
• Ian Fraser-Shapiro and Will Gilstrap—Obsidian Microdebitage Analysis By LAICP- MS

I am also pleased to be part of other papers with colleagues.

• John Terrell, Ethan Cochrane and Carl Lipo—Branching vs. Blending is Not the Question
• Jelmer Eerkens and Carl Lipo—Technological Change and Brownware Pottery Technologies in the Western Great Basin of North America
• Matthew Bell, Carl Lipo and Terry Hunt—Aerial Photography of Surface Features on Rapa Nui (Easter Island)

Finally, I'm helping to organize the poster session on Easter Island (with Terry Hunt) and a symposium on evolutionary archaeology with Jose Luis Lanata. This latter event (APPROACHING DARWIN'S BICENTENNIAL: THE STATE OF THE ART IN EVOLUTIONARY ARCHAEOLOGY) has a great line up of archaeologists working on evolutionary applications. One aspect of the symposium we pushed was to get folks involved who were not the "standard names" of the discipline. Thus, we have a conspicuous lack of folks like Mike O'Brien, Lee Lyman, R.C. Dunnell and others who have carried the banner of evolution for the past few years. Here is the full lineup (Saturday Morning 8-11:30AM):

• 8:00 P. Jeffrey Brantingham—Style, Function and Archaeological Site Frmation Processes
• 8:15 Mike Cannon—Modeling the Tradeoff between Foraging and Farming
• 8:30 Todd VanPool—Sex and Labor: An Evolutionary Model of the Division of Labor
• 8:45 Jillian Galle—Conspicuous Consumption and Gendered Social Strategies among Slaves in the 18th Century
• 9:00 Sarah B. McClure and Douglas J. Kennett—Cultural Transmission and the Generation of Variation in Spanish Neolithic Pottery
• 9:15 Jonathan Scholnick—Cultural Transmission and Spatial Patterning in Historic New England Gravestones
• 9:30 Aimee Plourde—Contributions to the Study of Sociopolitical Hierarchy from a Theory of the Evolved Capacity for Prestige
• 9:45 John Darwent—Phylogenies of Thule Period Harpoon Components from the North American Arctic
• 10:00 Karen Y. Smith—Correspondence Analysis: A Method for Monitoring Branching and Convergence in the Archaeological Record
• 10:15 John Terrell, Ethan Cochrane and Carl Lipo—Branching vs. Blending is Not the Question
• 10:30 Jose Luis Lanata and Arleen Garcia -Herbst—Exploring the Tempo and Mode of America’s Human Dispersal
• 10:45 Mark Collard and Briggs Buchanan—A Matrix Correlation Test of Early Paleoindian Migration Route Hypotheses
• 11:00 Briggs Buchanan and Mark Collard—Investigating the Peopling of North America through Cladistic Analyses of Early Paleoindian Projectile Points
• 11:15 Hector Neff—Discussant