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

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.

SAS Webinar
“Discover Mayan Civilization in Meso America: Reflections from Mexico City, Belize and Guatemala”
by
Lynette Blumhardt, Jan Johansen, Tom Johansen, Jeremy Johansen
Tuesday, July 1 2025
6:00 PM – 7:30 PM PT
Join here

What do you know about the Mayan Civilization in Meso America? Given that it developed in the Yucatan Peninsula where else did it develop? When did it flourish? What was is known for? These were some of the many questions that were addressed in March 2025 when a group of SAS members attended The Archeological Conservancy’s archaeological tour of Belize and Guatemala. The tour highlighted six Mayan sites in Belize and two in Guatemala including the very special Tikal. Some SAS members also toured sites at Mexico City including Teotihuacan. Pictures and commentary from these locations will highlight the impressive architecture, advanced understandings of astronomy, sophisticated writing system and conflict between cities.

The seminar will start at 6:00 pm PT and formally conclude at 7:30 pm.
Friends are welcome and also invited to join our organization. There is no participation fee.
You are invited to attend the webinar.