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April 2020
POSTPONED – Harry Winters – “Casa Blanca Calendar Stick Record”
Due to the Coronavirus AAHS is temporarily cancelling its monthly lectures
Find out more »May 2020
Don Liponi – “The Prehistoric Rock Art of the Kumeyaay and Cahuilla Native American Shamans in the Southern California Deserts”
Archaeological evidence shows that Native Americans have lived in the Southern California desert for at least 12,000 years. They thrived using their skills in resource management and spiritual direction. We do not believe that they had a written language, but they left us hundreds of paintings - spiritual communications that played a leading role in their villages and society. These ancient messages have been buffeted by the harsh desert landscape over the centuries. Recent technology has allowed us to resurrect these paintings…
Find out more »June 2020
September 2020
Karen R. Adams – “Food for Thought: The Deep History of Your Dinner”
Any five-year old will tell you where our food comes from...the grocery store! But behind that simple truth is an extremely long history of human efforts to modify wild plants to make them more manageable, better tasting, and eventually highly productive. Human efforts at plant domestication began over 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent and elsewhere. People on most of the world's continents domesticated a wide range of above-ground and below-ground plant parts, ranging from the stalk a leaf…
Find out more »October 2020
Kelsey Hanson – “Technologies of Capturing Color: Paint Practice and its Analysis in the U.S. Southwest”
Examples of red archaeological paint cakes Examples of red archaeological paint cakes with Munsell color chart sheets The American Southwest is brilliantly colored. However, naturally occurring colors are not easily imparted into the material world. The ability to capture color from the natural world through paint requires deep cultural knowledge of geologic sources, processing requirements, and application techniques that remain severely understudied. In this lecture, I will contextualize paint practice as…
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