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• SMU-in-Taos

2010 Cultural Institute weekend is July 22-25.

Course full –- please select another course or e-mail us to be placed on a wait list.

Course Full

Following Footsteps: The Archeology of Native American Migrations

Migration and resettlement have defined Native American survival strategies since the first humans set foot on the North American continent more than 10,000 years ago. In a rare, behind-the-scenes look at the town of Taos, you and your classmates will follow the travels of Native American migrants as they colonized this new world, exploring these movements through archaeological lines of evidence and traditional Native American beliefs. Your award-winning professors will delve into the world-changing colonization of the Americas at the end of the last major ice age around 10,000 years ago and then transition to exploring the later migrations of ancestral and modern Pueblo peoples in and around the northern Rio Grande region beginning at around 1000 A.D.

About the Instructors
SMU-in-Taos Executive Director Mike Adler is an archaeologist focused on village and communal life. His research has included excavations of ancient villages in the American Southwest and the Middle East and collaborative research with present-day Native American communities in New Mexico and Arizona. Adler integrates his research into educational programs in the SMU archaeology field school. His recent excavations at Chaves-Hummingbird Pueblo marked the third year SMU field school participants have participated in research at this site.

In 2009 David Meltzer was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest honors given to a scientist in the U.S., for his research on the first Americans who colonized North America following the Ice Age. He has worked to reconstruct the geomorphic, climatic and ecological conditions of the Gunnison Basin during Late Glacial times and excavated in Cement Creek Cave in the Upper Gunnison Basin. Meltzer is the Henderson-Morrison Chair in Anthropology in SMU’s Dedman College and is director of the QUEST Archaeological Research Program.

For more information
Contact Allison Curran at: taosci@smu.edu or call 214-768-TAOS (8267).