Completing the Circuit

By way of announcement, the first North Creek Shelter manuscript--of many to come--has been accepted for publication by Kiva. (Well, there was a general article on NCS "published" in the proceedings of the 2006 GSENM Science Symposium, but that only counts on CV's.) Dr. Yoder took the lead on this one (along with Dr. J, Mark Bodily, and myself) in describing the onset of early small seed processing on the Colorado Plateau. (One of the few thing's we'll need to fix is getting our figures into Kiva's tiny hobbit format.)

The groundstone assemblage at the site was just one series of the crap-ton of artifacts we pulled out of that place over 5 seasons of work. So keep an ear out for more to come within the next year. The next one on the list is a fatty descriptive paper that we'll be submitting to American Antiquity before the end of the year, and each of us has at least 3-5 separate other articles in mind to take the lead on. Oh, and the upper levels (Archaic, Fremont, Late Prehistoric) haven't really been touched yet, so if anyone's looking for a future project let us know.

Cal Porter during Glen Canyon, 1960

Joel sent this out to various people and I was forwarded a copy (thanks, Brad). Since no one has posted it yet, I thought I would. Cal is on the far left with the glasses, beard, and dark button-down shirt. To Cal's left, I recognize Don Fowler, but the rest of them don't look familiar.

Origins of Agriculture

I've been taking a class from Alan Simmons here at UNLV about the origins of agriculture. We're finally moving into the New World origins. After several thought provoking weeks of push-pull model discussions, HBE, and several other theories, it seems like we haven't resolved anything. We have only determined that reasons for adopting agriculture are too diverse to be attributed to just one catalyst.

I agree with that on many levels, however, I'd love to hear what the rest of you think. Since this blog IS called Friends of the Fremont, and the url is fremontfarmers.blogspot.com, what elelments do you fellow FoFs think were essential to the adoption of agriculture?