Wayne Sutherland
Wayne Sutherland worked more than 50 years as a geologist for private companies and government agencies in Wyoming, Montana, and Utah. His training and experiences include: geomorphology, gold and other metals, jade, diamonds, other gemstones and lapidary materials, coal, oil and gas, uranium, industrial minerals, mining claim evaluation, and federal mineral regulations. Wayne is a Wyoming licensed professional geologist PG-2767. He worked for the Wyoming State Geological Survey on contracts for many years, then as a permanent employee from 2005 through 2019. His work included co-authoring articles and reports on kimberlites, metals, industrial minerals, gemstones, and rare earth elements. He has compiled nine 30’ x 60’ geologic maps, and mapped or contributed to mapping ten 7.5’ geologic quadrangles in Wyoming. Many of these focused on the Granite Mountains in central Wyoming, an area well known for Wyoming jade and other gemstones.
After Wayne retired, he self-published a book on Wyoming Jade, which covered its characteristics, history, formation, and occurrences. He also contributed geologic studies to the Powars II archaeological site at the Sunrise iron mine, with interpretations relating to the red ochre and chert/quartzite nodules used for stone tools. Wayne’s non-geologic interests include amateur radio (call sign NQ7Q), hiking, horseback riding, and x-c skiing with his wife Judy. In 2003, they self-published a novel: Yellowstone Farewell – a geologically oriented fictional account of a major volcanic eruption of Yellowstone. Wayne enjoys wood burning custom-made walking staffs and other items. Wayne and Judy also designed and built two passive solar houses in Wyoming.
Parth Chauhan, Ph.D.
Parth R. Chauhan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities & Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science Education & Research in Mohali, Punjab. He has a diverse range of research interests that include the Old World, Asia, Eurasia, the Indian subcontinent, the Arabian peninsula, and Africa. His areas of focus within these regions include paleoanthropology, prehistory, human evolution, dispersals, adaptations & behavior, Paleolithic archaeology, Plio-Pleistocene environments, Quaternary sciences, ethnoarchaeology, experimental archaeology, experimental archaeology, geoarchaeology, lithic studies, vertebrate paleontology, archaeological survey and excavation methods, history of Asian/Indian archaeology, and rock art. Parth earned his Ph.D. in Archaeology & Prehistory from the University of Sheffield (UK), during which he studied the Palaeolithic evidence in the Siwalik hills of northern India. Since then, he has focused on projects in western and central India (e.g. Narmada Valley) as well as in eastern Africa. Parth has also been a Fulbright scholar associated with Deccan College and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Stone Age Institute & CRAFT Research Center (Indiana University), USA.
Indian Rock Art: This presentation introduces the rock art of India and respectively highlights two specific projects in central and western India. Though poorly dated, the known rock art is spread across the Subcontinent and occurs in diverse forms and contexts. This includes paintings, petroglyphs and cupules in rock shelters, on bedrock, on lateritic surfaces and occasionally caves. While there are thematic and stylistic dichotomies across the region, the evidence is abundant in most regions. This evidence includes figures of wild and domesticated animals, humans, composite images, geometric patterns, scenes of various subsistence and leisure activities etc. The project in central India is dominated by paintings in the central Narmada Valley, where the rock art is depicted in rock shelters on bedrock surfaces of Vindhyan and Gondwana Hills. The project in western India is dominated by geoglyphs in open air contexts on a lateritic substrate. This presentation outlines both projects, broadly compares the respective evidence and also highlights the respective methodological and interpretative challenges.
Ashley Lemke, Ph.D.
Ashley Lemke is an archaeologist and an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Michigan. An expert on submerged ancient sites in the Americas, she has received grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Her books include Anthropological Archaeology Underwater and The Architecture of Hunting. She previously taught at the University of Texas at Arlington, where she received the President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Outstanding Teaching Award for Tenure Track Faculty and was inducted into the Academy of Distinguished Teachers. She is a Fellow of The Explorers Club and a past chair of the Advisory Council on Underwater Archaeology. She has directed excavation projects in Texas and Michigan, as well as underwater projects in the Great Lakes and Atlantic Ocean, including numerous field schools. She has experience excavating at numerous archaeological sites in Europe including Germany, Spain, Romania, and Serbia.
Submerged Sites and Virtual Worlds: How Underwater Archaeology and AI Can Help Illuminate the Past
Underwater archaeology is often thought to just be shipwrecks but there are thousands of sites world wide that have been submerged. A growing group of archaeologists are researching submerged landscapes, areas that were once dryland but were flooded by post-glacial sea level rise. Investigating these landscapes can be challenging, as sites may be ephemeral, far offshore, and in deep water. In researching 9,000 year old submerged sites in Lake Huron, archaeologists have partnered with computer scientists to model the ancient landscape virtually. Populated with plants, cultural materials, and artificial intelligence caribou – the virtual world model is based on paleoenvironmental and archaeological data preserved in the cold, fresh waters of the Great Lakes. The virtual world can be used to guide research, exploring the ancient landscape, and for outreach and education.
Bruce Bradley, Ph.D.
Dr. Bruce Bradley is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Exeter, UK and co-PI of the Powars II Project in Sunrise, Wyoming. He has extensive experience with Stone Age technologies and experimental archaeology, received a BA in anthropology at the University of Arizona and PhD in archaeology at Cambridge University, UK. His early research was focused on the North American Southwest and Great Plains where he worked with Dr. George Frison and George Zeimens. Since then, his research has included the Upper Palaeolithic of Russia and France, horse domestication in Central Asia, the Mesolithic of Polar Siberia, Early Bronze Age in Ireland and Wales, etc. His current areas of research deal with prehistoric Pueblo archaeology of the American Southwest and the early peopling of the Americas, currently collaborating with colleagues in Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina. He makes his home in Cortez, Colorado.
Fifty-six Years and Counting: Wallace Great House Research
Excavations at a Chacoan Great House (5MT6970) in southwestern Colorado (A.D. 1050-1300) have been on-going since 1969. Much has been discovered, and many new issues and questions have evolved. This presentation summarizes the findings and presents new directions of the research.
Rafael Suarez, Ph.D.
Rafael Suárez is Head of the Anthropology Institute, Director of the Department of Archaeology and Professor of Prehistory at the Universidad de la República (Uruguay). He received his B.A. from Universidad de la República (Uruguay) and PhD from Universidad Nacional de la Plata (Argentina). His interests include the early peopling of South America, Paleoamerican technology, and hunter-gatherer mobility and lifeways.
Oversized Points in the Paleoamerican Technology of Uruguay: New Data and Perspectives
Early (circa 12,500 years ago) complex flaked stone artifacts known as Fishtail points have been found throughout much of Latin America, from Belize south to Patagonia in Argentina. The complexity of these tools is best illustrated by what are known as “oversized” points, which appear to have had no practical use. This presentation describes the distinctive features of these enigmatic artifacts and explores current theories regarding their possible functions.
Bonnie Lawrence Smith
Bonnie Lawrence-Smith is a fifth-generation Wyoming native. She left Wyoming briefly to attend UCLA, where she received her degree in Anthropology and Art History. She is the co-founder and director of the Bighorn Basin Art and Science Experience and the current Wyoming State Program Coordinator for Project Archaeology, an educational organization that emphasizes the importance of protecting the nation’s rich cultural resources. Her research focuses on the fragile connections between golden eagles, native peoples, and rock art. In 2022, she helped found the Yellowstone Chapter of the Wyoming Archaeological Society. She is the former curatorial assistant for the Draper Natural History Museum and co-curator of the Monarch of the Skies exhibit housed there. Bonnie, along with an amazing group of women, founded the Sisterhood of the Traveling Trowel in 2014, a group that supports females entering the field of Plains archaeology. Her fieldwork includes the excavation of a Columbian Era mammoth from Buffalo Bill Reservoir and discoveries of connections between ancient Thunderbird rock art and the nesting habits of golden eagles in the Bighorn Basin.
Fanxiu Meng
Fanxiu Meng is currently a Ph.D. student in archaeology at the University of Tokyo, with academic training and field experience in China, North America, and Japan. She holds dual undergraduate degrees from Sichuan University in China and Eastern New Mexico University, as well as a graduate degree from Eastern New Mexico University, specializing in lithic technology and Paleoindian archaeology in North America. Her graduate research at the Blackwater Draw site focused on lithic assemblage patterns and technological organization from the Clovis period through historical times, aiming to reconstruct site use patterns and adaptive strategies in response to environmental challenges. This work helped shape her core interest in the Peopling of the Americas. Now based in Japan, she investigates Late Pleistocene lithic traditions in central Japan and Hokkaido to explore technological complexity, local trajectories, and potential parallels with bifacial technologies in North America. Fanxiu’s research further addresses key questions in human dispersal studies, such as whether early migrants were ancestral to Clovis populations through technological perspectives, and how advanced bifacial technologies in North America may have been influenced by developments in Northeast Asia, including Japan, the Altai region, and Northeast China.
“Reframing Lithic Parallels: A comparative view of bifacial tools in Late Pleistocene Japan and North America”
The debate surrounding the peopling of the Americas has reached a critical juncture, where the traditional Clovis-first model (Clovis represents the first widespread technological complex in the New World around 13,250–12,800 cal BP, Waters and Stafford, 2007) is recently challenged by discoveries that pre-date Clovis, like Cooper’s Ferry (~16,000 cal BP), where stemmed points resemble Hokkaido’s Kamishirataki 2 site. However, these trans-Pacific parallels present a fundamental dilemma: It remains unclear whether the chronological and technological relationships, and the morphological resemblance between these assemblages, reflects shared cultural ancestry or independent technological convergence (Nakazawa 2020; Fiedel et al. 2021). Considering the bifacial and stemmed point tradition in Honshu can be reliably traced to the Incipient Jōmon period or earlier, the divergent regional trajectories of Terminal Pleistocene lithic technologies in Japan were also confirmed (Morisaki et al. 2018). These complexities suggest that technological similarities between Japan and North America cannot be explained solely by morphological resemblance. This highlights the critical need to move beyond morphological comparisons and develop integrated approaches examining technological correlation within the Late Pleistocene environmental context. This presentation aims to introduce and share the technological and paleoenvironmental context of Late Pleistocene Japan, with particular attention to central Japan (Kanto region) and Hokkaido. As part of my current research, I will present the bifacial tool tradition from Sagamino site cluster as a case study to interpret local lithic variability. Rather than proposing a migration hypothesis, this presentation emphasizes the need to move beyond morphological parallels and consider integrated aspects that situate technological assemblages within their broader environmental and regional contexts.