Special Programs

Speaker Series

Now in its tenth year the Far Western Occasional Speaker Series is a major forum for scholars to present their research, debate their ideas. Speakers and audience are diverse and include some of the top academics in the country, graduate students engaged in cutting-edge research, as well as archaeologists from the contracting world. The food is always excellent and the beer is free.

Past presentations include:

Rebecca Allen and Scott Baxter - Past Forward, Inc., Clinton Blount - Albion Environmental, Inc., and Linda Hylkema -Santa Clara University 

• Big History in a Small Place: Santa Clara University's Archaeological Riches

Frank Bayham - CSU Chico 

• Feasting with Small Mammals: Inferences from the Archaeofauna at a Hohokam Platform Mound in the Desert Southwest

James "Pat" Barker - Bureau of Land Management 

• Some Thoughts on Prehistoric Evolution in the South Pacific and Great Basin

James Barnes - Bureau of Land Management 

• The Life of Reilly; The Archaeology of an 1880s Silver Mine in Panament Valley, California

Loukas Barton - Ph. D. Candidate UC Davis 

• Weeds Seeds Rocks, Hogs Dogs Pots: An Ag-origins Nursery Rhyme for Arid Ancient Asia

Adi Behar-Eliyaha - Weizmann Institute of Science, Isreal 

• Temperature Affected Sediments; Their Contribution to Archaeological Interpretation

John Berg - Far Western 

• Excavations at Tel Dor: An overview of 20 years of Investigations

Robert Bettinger - UC Davis 

• The Bow and its Affect on Social Organization in Western North America, and Holocene Hunter-Gatherers 

Douglas Bird and Rebecca Bliege Bird - Stanford 

• Do Bigger Animals Provide Higher Hunting Returns? Lessons from the Martu

Brian Byrd - Far Western

• When Gatherers Became Farmers in the Near East
• San Diego County Prehistory
• Early Village and Household Organization at Neolithic Beidha, Jordan

Kim Carpenter - Far Western 

• Testing Models Of Social Boundary Defense In Northeastern California

Clint Cole - Ph. D. Canidate UC Davis 

• The Fremont Frontier in North Meadow Valley Wash, Eastern Nevada

Julia Costello - Foothill Resources, Ltd. 

• Discovery of the Nabataean Shrine at Petra, Jordan

Christyann Darwent - UC Davis 

• Where the Muskox Roam: Prehistoric Biogeography in the Eastern Arctic

Christyann Darwent and John Darwent - UC Davis 

• Inughuit & Explorers: The Archaeology of Inglefield Land, Northwest Greenland

Jerome Davis  

• Accelerator Mass Spectrometry, Physics in Service to Other Disciplines

Christopher Dore

• Update of Geospatial Technologies and their Use in CRM

Jelmer Eerkens - UC Davis 

• Obsidian Use and Mining in the Southern Nasca Region, Peru, and  Hunter-gatherers and Pottery Production: An Overview of Recent Research in the Western Great Basin

Jelmer Eerkens - UC Davis, and Jeff Rosenthal - Far Western

• Sourcing Marine Shell Beads in California

Jason Eschelman 

• Ancient DNA in Central California

John Foster - California State Parks/Indiana University

• The Taino World on the Eve of Columbus: Archaeological Exploration in the Dominican Republic

Amy Gilreath and Jerome King - Far Western

• Coso Rock Art: An Archaeological (non-Ethnographic) Contextual Interpretation; Recording it in the 21st Century

Amy Gilreath and Sharon Waechter - Far Western 

• Late-Period Resource Intensification in Sierra Valley, Eastern Plumas County: A Response to the Medieval Climatic Anomaly

Ken Gobalet 

• Archaeological Perspectives on the Native American Salmon and Steelhead Fisheries of California and Concerns for Caution in Faunal Reporting

Donn Grenda - Statistical Research, Inc.

• Archaeology in Ballona Wetlands, West Los Angeles

Christine Hastorf -UC Berkeley 

• Sea-changes in Stable Communities: What do changes in Foodways Mean at Chiripa, Bolivia, and Catalhöyük, Turkey?

William Hildebrandt and Kelly McGuire - Far Western 

• The Rise and Fall of Virgin Puebloan Culture: A View from the Gold Butte Hinterlands

William Hildebrandt and Allika Ruby - Far Western

• Survey of the Coso Pinyon Zone

John Johnson - Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History 

• Migrations in California Prehistory: Insights Derived from Mitochondrial DNA Evidence

Terry Joslin - Caltrans

• Fire-Affected Rock Pavements. Implications for Understanding Late Period Subsistence Strategies in the Páx·es·anel Region

Brian Kemp - UC Davis 

• Genetic Analysis of Early Holocene Skeletal Remains from Alaska and its Implications for the Timing of the Peopling of the Americas

Mark Kowta - CSU Chico

• Bridging the Gap: An Evolutionary Ecology Approach for Maidu Mythology and Archaeology

Scott MacEachern - Bowdoin College, Maine

• Kom - Kribi: Cultural Heritage Management on the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline, 1999-2004

Randall Milliken - Consulting in the Past

• mtDNA Roots and Twigs
• Scheme A and Scheme B: Recalibrating Past Time Periods in the Central Sierras

Chris Morgan - CSU Stanislaus

• Coping with Environmental Variability: Late Holocene Climate Change and Hunter - Gatherer Adaptive Response

Wendy Nelson

• What's For Dinner Mom? 950 B.P.

Christopher O'Brien 

• Dental Increments, Age and Season of Death: What's Happened Since Sheepy East? 

Tom Origer - Origer's Obisidan Laboratory

• The Future of Dating the Past with Obsidian Hydration

Richard Perry - US Army Corp of Engineers 

• An Overview of Archaeology on San Nicolas Island

Seetha Reddy - Reddy Anthropology Consulting

• Food, Fodder or Fuel: Gleaning Prehistoric Human Behavior from Plant Remains

Ilan Sharon

• Early Iron Age Radiometric Dates from Tel Dor: Preliminary Implications for Phoenicia

Thomas Stafford - Stafford Research, Inc. 

• Geochronology of Clovis and the Late Pleistocene Extinctions

Kojun Ueno Sunseri - Postdoctoral Research Fellow UC Berkeley 

• Hiding in Plain Sight: Engineered Colonial Landscape and Indegenous Reinvention on the Frontier of New Mexico

Sharon Waechter - Far Western

• Basalt Quarries And XRF Studies In Northeastern California and Western Nevada

Steve Weiner - Weizmann Institute of Science, Isreal

•  Early Diagenesis and the Completeness of the Archaeological Record

G. James West

• Pollen Analysis of Arlington Springs Sediments at Santa Rosa Island, California

Randy Wiberg

• Archaeological Investigations at CA-YOL-69; An Historical/Protohistoric Settlement and Cemetery Along Cache Creek Near Madison, California

David Wilcox - Museum of Northern Arizona

• Implications of Over a Decade of Hilltop Survey in West-Central Arizona

Greg White - CSU Chico 

• Archaeological Evidence for Prehistoric Migration in Northern California

Bruce Winterhalder - UC Davis

•  Seven Reasons to Remain a Forager

Eric Wohlgemuth - Far Western 

• The Course of Plant Food Intensification in Central California: Progress Report of the First Quarter Century of Archaeobotany
•  Salvage Excavations At Ca-Yol-187: A Preliminary Report Of Findings