SAS Scholar Seminar
Saturday, March 7, 2026
2:00 – 3:30 PM PT
“Juvenile Osteology Workshop” by Bella Garcia
and
“Archaeology Field Research School Ireland” by Janel Pleskac and David Nelson

Abstract: Bella Garcia who attended the Slavia Field School in 2024 continued her training in forensics by attending the Juvenile Osteology Research Laboratory Workshop in Romania. In this talk she will describe her experiences working with a set of 69 juvenile remains for the 17th century. Advanced technologies, such as histology and CT imaging are employed to advance this research.

About the speaker: Bella Garcia is a graduate student with a BA in Anthropology from CSUSB and is enrolled in the Anatomy & Forensic Anthropology MSc program at the University of Dundee. She was a recipient of SAS scholarship in both 2024 and 2025. In 2025 she gave SAS a presentation on her experiences at Źelewo Bioarchaeology Field School in Poland.

Abstract: At the Castles in Communities, Irish Archaeology Field School at Ballintober Castle, Ireland, both Janel Pleskac and David Nelson lived and worked in a small Irish village while participating in a six-week research and excavation project at Ballintober Castle. The program blended archaeological training in surveying, geophysical techniques, and excavation with lab analysis, giving them real experience in uncovering and interpreting the past. Beyond the fieldwork, they connected with the local community and culture through shared meals, village life, and excursions, making the experience both academically enriching and personally meaningful.

About the speaker: Janel Pleskac is a graduate student in Cultural Heritage Resource Management at Sonoma State University, specializing in community-engaged archaeology and oral history. She conducted an independent oral history project in Ballintober, Ireland, during the Castles in Communities Archaeology Field School, documenting local musical life, memory, and place-based heritage alongside archaeological research. Her work integrates oral history, archival research, and landscape archaeology to examine how living communities produce and sustain cultural heritage. She has also worked on archaeological projects in California and Ireland and currently serves as a Museum Archives Assistant at Sonoma Historic Park.
Janel will present research in progress from “Listening to Roscommon”, her community-based oral history project documenting the musical heritage of County Roscommon, Ireland, which was conducted in collaboration with the Castles in Communities Archaeology Field school. Through interviews with local musicians across multiple genres, the project treats oral histories as intangible artifacts, revealing how music, memory, and place function as layers of living cultural landscape. Her presentation will reflect on the methodological possibilities and challenges of integrating oral history into archaeological practice.

About the speaker: David Nelson is a student at Las Positas College. He is a retired electrician who is passionate about archaeology. He attended a field school through Las Positas College where he gained initial experience with excavation. In 2025 David attended the Irish Archaeology Field School at Ballintober Castle. He also attended the California Archaeology Field School at Foothill College where he participated in the excavation at Hidden Villa Farm in 2024.

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84081581346?pwd=57CzLg6FTaAdPa2FS9VobEO9DJmKJV.1

SAS Webinar
Saturday, February 7, 2026
2:00 – 3:30 PM PT
“Indigenous Peoples of California’s Bay-Delta Region”
By
David Stuart
Anthropologist and former Museum Director
at
Pena Archaeology Facility (607 Pena Dr. Suite 600; Davis, CA) and via Zoom

Abstract: David Stuart will touch on the Native languages of the San Francisco Bay Area, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, and the adjacent Central Valley heartland (“Bay-Delta”) region and will summarize the immigration and spread of the Indigenous ancestors throughout the area. He will describe the traditional lifeways of the California Indians from our region, including their care for local habitats to sustainably support a population that was among the highest in pre-colonial North America. Then he will discuss the colonial period and highlight the impact these regional Native people had on California’s colonial history.

Bay-Delta Native nations were disrupted by the missionaries and soldiers that invaded the Bay Area on behalf of the Spanish monarchy. The Delta was initially a barrier to Spanish incursions into the interior heartland, became a place of refuge that helped preserve Native cultures and autonomy, then became a base for Indigenous armed resistance. Diseases and depredations eroded the strength of heartland nations and many people went to Mission San Jose and other missions. Baptized Indians were turned out by the missions in the Mexican era to become “serfs” for the early settler/barons such as John Marsh, Johann Sutter, and Charles Weber. Indigenous people directly and indirectly assisted the USA victory over Mexico, only to suffer state- and federal-sponsored genocide during and after the Gold Rush. Nevertheless, California Indians survived and continue to be our neighbors.

About the Speaker: David Stuart began his career at Caswell State Park on the lower Stanislaus River, where he helped Indigenous women gather basketry materials. His interest stirred, Dave studied anthropology and biology at Modesto JC, Fresno State, and U Colorado. He did fieldwork—primarily CRM surveys—in the San Joaquin Valley and the Sierra Nevada from Tahoe to Tehachapi. Dave was the first Assistant State Archaeologist of Colorado. He was an archaeologist/cultural resources specialist/planner for the National Park Service, working primarily in Florida, Louisiana, and the Southwest. Dave returned to California and developed museums and programs for the City of Ventura, then he directed the Sacramento Science Center (now MoSAC), the Sacramento History Museum in Old Sacramento, and the San Joaquin County Historical Museum in Micke Grove Regional Park near Lodi. Since retiring 7 years ago, he has coauthored a book, assisted planning for the new Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta National Heritage Area, served on the boards of Exhibit Envoy and the Sacramento River Delta Historical Society, and written a series of articles on Native cultures and the history of the Bay-Delta region—the subject of the book he is now researching.
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81061698639?pwd=jbS7hS1C0LPtZTflTG2zlbKfIJfaSD.1

SAS Webinar
Saturday, January 3, 2026
2:00 – 3:30 PM PT
“Archaeology in Ireland and the Southwest: an educational experience”
By
Allison Champ, UC Berkeley student
via Zoom

As an aspiring professor and archaeologist, exposures to various archaeological landscapes offer differing perspectives and the opportunity for unique skill development. Two field schools that Allison attended will be the subject of her review. They were Monastic Midlands in Birr, Ireland and Crow Canyon Field School in Cortez, Colorado. Each offered contrasting environments and time scales. Allison will comment on their similarities and differences.

Allison Champ is a senior at University of California, Berkeley double majoring in Anthropology and Psychology. She is a research assistant in the Bear Bones Lab and Geoarchaeology and Southwest Asia Prehistory Lab and a data collection lead for Social Origins Lab. All are at U. C. Berkeley.
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81274184293?pwd=tUBXnZTaZ7MmwssFiUUbuK1PjKS1xI.1

“Inuit History in Northern Greenland: Fragility and Resilience”
by
Christyann Darwent, Professor of Archaeology, UC Davis
at
Pena Archaeology Facility (607 Pena Dr. Suite 600; Davis, CA and via Zoom
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84956957687?pwd=zG5MbOh8JiuysD3jD1AwKHvizT17PA.1

The Annual Meeting will be conducted in person at the U.C. Davis Pena Archaeology Facility (607 Pena Dr. Suite 600; Davis, CA), and broadcasted via Zoom starting at 2:00 PM PT with a presentation by Christyann Darwent, UCD Professor, and formally conclude after the SAS Annual Meeting. After which all attendees are invited to attend a dinner to socialize at Symposium Restaurant, Davis at 6:00 PM.

The schedule for the event is as follows:
1:00 – Set up, meet and greet (If you are unable to attend in person, you may join the webinar starting as early as 1:45 PM.)
2:00 – Featured talk “Inuit cultures in the Arctic” by Christyann Darwent
3:30 – SAS Annual Meeting
6:00 – Socialize at restaurant

Title: “Inuit History in Northern Greenland: Fragility and Resilience ” by Christyann Darwent

Abstract: Human history of the North American Arctic has been a cycle of expansions and contractions, of mobility and migration, and of fragility and resilience. Archaeology brings a long-term perspective to the relationship between humans and the arctic environment. More recently, however, the face of archaeological research and knowledge production has undergone rapid change, particularly in the past decade. Just as geneticists and isotopic chemists have discovered the wealth of information locked in the archaeological record of the arctic, these formerly frozen sites are rapidly melting or eroding into the sea. In addition, Inuit scholars and communities are redefining their relationship with archaeology and archaeologists. Based on the author’s own field work, this talk focuses on the historical ecology of Smith Sound at the northern edge of what is now Canada and Greenland. New questions and new methods have enhanced our understanding of a place that exemplifies both isolation and long-distance social bonds, precariousness and resilience.

About the Speaker: Dr. Christyann Darwent is a professor of Anthropology at UC Davis. She is originally from Calgary where she completed her undergraduate degree in archaeology and undertook her first of several field seasons in the Canadian High Arctic 30 years ago. After receiving her MA at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver and a PhD from the University of Missouri, she started her career at UC Davis in 2001. Since then, she has conducted NSF-sponsored archaeological excavations in Kotzebue Sound, Alaska and Inglefield Land, NW Greenland. For the past decade her lab has also been conducting archaeological research near the Native village of Shaktoolik in Norton Sound, Alaska. In addition to studies of past subsistence practices and social organization among Inuit, Inughuit, Inupiaq, and Yup’ik occupants of the Arctic over the past 1000 years, she has published on the history of Inuit sled dogs using ancient and modern DNA.

SAS Webinar
Saturday, November 1, 2025
2:00 – 3:30 PM PT
“Culprits behind Plate of Brass: Dare Stones”
By
Melissa Darby MA
Senior Archaeologist/Historian
Lower Columbia Research & Archaeology LLC
via
Zoom
Join Zoom meeting

In 1937, two Elizabethan artifacts came to light that created headline news across the United States and each of the alleged artifacts addressed a different long-standing Elizabethan mystery. The first artifact to come to light that year was the Drake Plate of Brass, inscribed in crude block letters of old English text and found on a hillside overlooking San Francisco Bay. A few months later a stone slab was allegedly found along the Chowan River in North Carolina. The similarly inscribed stone seemed to describe the fate of the 117 settlers of the Lost Colony of Roanoke. This presentation will demonstrate that historian Herbert E. Bolton was the ringleader of the Plate of Brass hoax, and assisted other historians, George Hammond and Haywood Pearce Jr., with the planning and implementation of the Dare Stone fraud. An underlying motive of these men was the desire to uplift a White and English national identity for America. However, one of Bolton’s motives for the Plate of Brass hoax, and perhaps his main motive, was his desire to shut down the theory that Drake landed further north on either the Oregon or Washington coasts. The paradigm is shifting, and a consensus is building among academics that Drake actually landed on the Oregon coast.

Melissa Darby is an award-winning historian and anthropologist, and affiliated research faculty in the Anthropology Department at Portland State University. She is principal investigator and sole proprietor of Lower Columbia Research & Archaeology. Darby has worked for over forty years in the Northwest and is a noted authority on the ethnohistory of the Native people of the lower Columbia River region. Her research on Native American cultures of the area includes important works on settlement patterns, plankhouse architecture, and plant foods used by the indigenous people of the region. She has contributed substantially to our understanding of the Native peoples and the world they inhabited prior to European colonization.

The seminar will start at 2:00 PM PT and formally conclude at 3:30 PM.
Friends are welcome and also invited to join our organization. There is no participation fee.
You are invited to attend the webinar before 2:00 PM for chat time.

SAS Webinar
Saturday, October 11, 2025
2:00 – 3:30 PM PT
“100,000 years of human evolution in Southern Africa”
By
Brenna M. Henn,
Associate Director for Human Genomics, Associate Professor @ UC Davis
and Gillian Meeks, PhD student @ UC Davis
via Zoom

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89404358919?pwd=f3d6GJGLszNaAGMPaC1N5axb15GMSp.1

South Africa holds a prominent place in the story of human evolution, particularly due to the significant number of hominin fossils found there. The “Cradle of Humankind,” a UNESCO World Heritage site near Johannesburg, is a key location for discoveries related to early human ancestors. Fossils like those of Australopithecus africanus and Homo naledi have provided crucial insights into our evolutionary journey. The advent of population genetic and quantitative genetic theory has added dimensions to this story of human evolution. Genomic data from Sub-Saharan African populations is being coupled with the phenotypic data to paint an evolutionary history. Join U. C. Davis, Professor Brenna Henn and her PhD student in a tour of 100,000 years of human Sub-Saharan evolution from its beginning to South African colonial period.

Brenna Henn is a population geneticist in the Department of Anthropology and in the Genome Center at the University of California, Davis. She began her research by studying the deep population structure and complex migration patterns of African hunter-gatherer groups. Motivated by her PhD training in anthropology, she aims to approach questions of genomic and phenotypic diversity from an interdisciplinary standpoint. She continues to primarily focus on African populations. Her field sites include efforts to collect DNA samples, demographic data and biomedical phenotypes in the Kalahari Desert, Cederberg Mountains and the Richtersveld of South Africa, as well as collaborations in Namibia and Ethiopia.

Saturday, September 27, 2025
2:00 – 3:30 PM PT
“Artifactor Scanning System”
By
Tara Johnson
at
Children’s Natural History Museum, 4074 Eggers Drive, Fremont, CA 94536 and via Zoom

A simple, convenient, fast, and durable system for unidirectionally scanning three-dimensional objects has many applications in archaeological fieldwork and cataloging collections. Please join us for a presentation on and demonstration of the Artifactor Scan System, a fossil and artifact scanning platform created by Tara Johnson and manufactured at Maker Nexus in Sunnyvale, CA. Using the Widar software (subscription required), scans take approximately 3-5 minutes to collect and 15-20 minutes to process. Please feel free to bring your iPhone and a non-fragile artifact, roughly 1 cubic foot in size, to try scanning for yourself. The Artifactor Scan System is still a prototype, with new types of clamping supports under active development, so feedback on possible new use cases would be greatly appreciated.

Tara Johnson is a senior at Irvington High School in Fremont, CA. She has eight years of experience applying computer modeling, programming, and rapid prototyping technologies in the digital humanities. She is the creator of the Artifactor scanning system, which was prototyped at Maker Nexus and is being tested in collaboration with the Children’s Natural History of Fremont. She is also a contributor to Pyhiero, a Python-based computational linguistics processor that translates Manual de Codage (MdC) notation to Unicode Egyptian hieroglyphs.
You are invited to attend in person but the presentation will be available in a webinar. The presentation will start at 2:00 pm PT and formally conclude at 3:30 PM.
Friends are welcome and also invited to join our organization. There is no participation fee but there is an entrance fee at the museum.

SAS Webinar
Saturday, September 13, 2025
2:00 – 3:30 PM PT
“The Middle Stone Age from Varsche Rivier 003, South Africa: environmental variation, innovation, and behavioral diversity”
By
Teresa Steele, Professor, Dept. of Anthropology – UC Davis
at
Pena Archaeology Facility (607 Pena Dr. Suite 600; Davis, CA) and via Zoom

The Middle Stone Age of Africa is significant because it provides the context for the evolution of all living people. During this time and within this technocomplex, human innovations appear which indicate the early evolution of many behaviors that are often seen as reflecting humans’ complex cognition and sociality. Historically, much of the evidence comes from archaeological sites situated in the Fynbos of South Africa’s southern and southwestern coasts. To explore diversity within the Middle Stone Age, our team initiated excavations at Varsche Rivier 003 to investigate adaptations to the arid Succulent Karoo. In deposits dating from 92-80 thousand years ago we found innovations that distinguished these populations from contemporaries living 100 km to the south in more hospitable environments. However, with subsequent environmental changes, the people using Varsche Rivier 003 employed technologies similar to the people living further in the south, indicating connections between the populations. These results provide the opportunity to further consider the contexts for Middle Stone Age innovation and cultural transmission, in southern Africa and beyond. They can be compared with other innovations found elsewhere in southern Africa, as well as in northern and eastern Africa.

Teresa Steele is a paleoanthropologist who studies the later phases of human evolution – the emergence and evolution of people who were behaviorally and anatomically like recent humans. Professor Steele’s research focuses on Middle and Late Pleistocene (780,000-10,000 years ago) archaeology – the Middle Paleolithic made by Neanderthals in Europe and the Middle Stone Age (MSA) made by their contemporaries in Africa. She studies the mode and tempo of human behavioral evolution during this time through zooarchaeology – reconstructing human subsistence and ecology through the patterns of variation found in animal bones and mollusks preserved in archaeological sites. She conducts research in South Africa, Morocco and France.