Past Seminars

Jennifer E. Payne is the Acting Division Leader for the Environmental Protection and Compliance Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The Division’s portfolio includes cultural and biological resources, pollution prevention, waste management and project planning, National Environmental Policy Act compliance, the Resources Conservation and Recovery Act, air and water quality, the Environmental Management System, environmental health physics, and Integrated Project Review, and many other diverse programs. Dr. Payne received a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Oklahoma, specializing in southwestern archaeology, an MA in Anthropology from the University of Colorado at Denver, and a BA in Anthropology from the State University of New York at Fredonia. She has almost 20 years of experience at Los Alamos National Laboratory, beginning as a Graduate Research Assistant in 2000. Throughout her career at Los Alamos National Laboratory, she has focused on environmental compliance. For the past 14 years, her primary focus has been on implementation of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the Site-Wide Environmental Impact Statement.

The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) are both process-based requirements. This means that they can be open to interpretation and must follow a process to show that programs and projects have done their due diligence to consider potential impacts to the environment and the public. Archaeologists and cultural resource managers who work to support government agencies often prepare NEPA documents, cultural resources reports, development of mitigation actions, and implementation of mitigations. This seminar will provide an overview of NEPA, its requirements, and the intersection between it and the NHPA.

1. Develop a more robust understanding of the National Environmental Policy Act;
2. Develop an understanding of the relationship between the National Environmental Policy Act and National Historic Preservation Act; and
3. Identify potential impacts from a proposed project.

April Kamp-Whittaker is a PhD candidate at Arizona State University and co-host of the Archaeology Show on the Archaeology Podcast Network. She has been a member of SAA for 10 years and served on both the SAA Student Affairs Committee and the Committee on Museums, Collections, and Curation. April has held a range of positions in museums, academia, and CRM. Her work in museums and academia has focused on ways to make archaeology accessible and relevant to a broad audience.

Attending conferences can be intimidating and confusing. How do you find a session? Register? Organize your own session? And what do you wear? This seminar will try to answer common questions about participating in the SAA Annual Meeting and give you tools for leaving the conference feeling like you had the most productive experience possible. If you have never been before or feel like you are not maximizing your conference experience, then this seminar should help. The instructor will cover the basics from deciding if you should present for the first time all the way to organizing your own session. She will also discuss other ways to participate in the conference and the SAA. At the end of the seminar, you should feel confident in your ability to have a fun and successful conference!

1. Acquire strategies for being a confident conference attendee.
2. Understand different ways to be involved in the SAA Annual Meeting and how to make use of conference resources.
3. Organize your time at the SAA Annual Meeting by knowing the structure of the meetings and how to prioritize events.

As Assistant Research Scientist at the Center for Applied Isotope Studies at the University of Georgia (CAIS-UGA), Carla S. Hadden is responsible for the preparation, analysis, and reporting of over 4,000 radiocarbon samples each year at one of the largest radiocarbon dating laboratories in North America. She regularly publishes on radiocarbon method development and archaeological applications in high-impact journals such as Science Advances, American Antiquity, and Radiocarbon, and is regularly called upon to peer review manuscript submissions on radiocarbon dating and Bayesian chronological modeling in archaeology. Dr. Hadden co-organized the 9th International Symposium on Radiocarbon and Archaeology, a 5-day event attended by over 100 archaeologists and radiocarbon researchers representing 25 countries. She currently serves as an Associate Editor for Radiocarbon, the main international journal of record for research articles relevant to radiocarbon techniques used in archaeological, geophysical, oceanographic, and related dating. She also regularly guest lectures and hosts lab tours and workshops at CAIS-UGA on the topic of radiocarbon dating.

Radiocarbon dating is one of the most important tools for chronology building in archaeology. The purpose of this seminar is to provide archaeologists with a practical primer on radiocarbon dating, with a focus on best practices in sample selection, data reporting, and interpretation. The intended audience includes students, academic faculty, and professional archaeologists who incorporate radiocarbon dating in their research design or are responsible for disseminating the results of such research. The seminar will highlight strategies for evaluating sample quality based on context, preservation, and material type; provide a detailed explanation of the conventions and requirements for reporting uncalibrated and calibrated radiocarbon dates; and review the most common mistakes and misconceptions in interpreting radiocarbon data.

1. Identify what constitutes a “good” or “bad” sample for dating;
2. Understand how to follow the conventions for reporting radiocarbon data in technical reports and scientific journals;
3. Use the calibration curve to convert conventional radiocarbon dates to calibrated calendar dates and to identify time periods that are likely to yield ambiguous/low-precision calibrated dates;
4. Assess the quality of published “legacy data” by evaluating sample context, material type, and associated metadata; and
5. Avoid common mistakes and pitfalls in interpreting and communicating radiocarbon dates.

S. Terry Childs recently retired as the manager of the Department of the Interior Museum Program that provides policy, oversight, training, and technical assistance to the ten DOI bureaus and offices that own over 206 million museum objects and archives. She has advocated for attention to archaeological collections curation, preservation, and use through numerous books and articles since she began working for the National Park Service’s Archeology Program in 1993. She is the primary author of the Federal regulations on the disposal and deaccessioning of federal archaeological collections proposed to be added to 36 CFR 79, the Curation of Federally-Owned and Administered Archeological Collections. These proposed regulations were issued in November 2014 for public comment, which she then revised based on the numerous comments received. The National Park Service is currently working to publish those regulations as final. Childs also was the first Chair of the SAA Committee on Curation, now Committee on Museums, Collections, and Curation, in 2000-2006; served on the SAA Board of Directors in 2013-2016; and chaired the Archaeological Collections Consortium in 2017-2018.

Jenna Domeischel is the curator of the Blackwater Draw Museum at Eastern New Mexico University in Portales, New Mexico where she has implemented several deaccessions. She has served on The Society for American Archaeology’s (SAA) Committee on Museums, Collections, and Curation, and is currently a member of the Archaeological Collections Consortium, a multi-agency national task force concerned with archaeological curation. Jenna is also the founder and chair of the SAA Curation Interest Group.

Deaccessioning is a collections management tool that is available for wise and judicious removal of archaeological collections. This two-hour seminar is designed to help archaeologists, curators, collections managers, repository managers, and others make good decisions about the appropriateness of a potential deaccession and both the means and the steps necessary to implement a deaccession of archaeological collections or objects. Critical to decision-making is knowledge about the ownership of the archaeological material proposed to be deaccessioned and pertinent laws and policies. Case studies of successful deaccessions will be presented.

1. Learn to assess whether or not to deaccession archaeological materials and what tools are necessary to make good decisions.
2. Learn the steps involved in deaccessioning, including who should be involved, the need to document every step, and the costs involved.
3. Learn the opportunities afforded by the deaccessioning process, including curatorial and educational benefits.

Courtney Hofman is an assistant professor of Anthropology and co-director at the University of Oklahoma's Laboratories of Molecular Anthropology and Microbiome Research. Dr. Hofman has conducted research that integrates interdisciplinary methods and fields, including genomics, ancient DNA, proteomics, and archaeology to explore human-environment interactions on two very different scales. First, she investigates human-wildlife interactions and their influence on changing environments over the past millennia to inform conservation decisions. Second, Dr. Hofman conducts research on the evolution of the human microbiome using dental calculus and paleofeces from archaeological contexts. Dr. Hofman completed her PhD at the University of Maryland in collaboration with the Center for Conservation Genomics at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the Anthropology department at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, where she is also a research associate.

Dr. Christina Warinner earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Harvard University in 2010 and received postdoctoral training in genomics and proteomics at the University of Zurich (2010-2012) and the University of Oklahoma (2012-2014). In 2014, she was appointed Assistant Professor of Anthropology and was awarded a Presidential Research Professorship at the University of Oklahoma (OU). In 2016, she was made W2 Group Leader of Microbiome Sciences at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (MPI-SHH), and in 2018 she was promoted to University Professor in the Faculty of Biological Sciences at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany. Since 2019, she is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University. Warinner specializes in biomolecular archaeology, with an emphasis on reconstructing the prehistory of human foods and the evolution of the microbiome. She is known for her pioneering work in ancient DNA and proteins research, which has contributed to the study of prehistoric human health, ancestral human oral and gut microbiota, the origins of dairying, and past human migrations. She is a 2012 TED Fellow, and her TED Talks on ancient dental calculus and the evolution of the human diet have been viewed more than 2 million times. In addition to her research, she is actively engaged in public outreach and created the Adventures in Archaeological Science coloring book, now available in thirty languages, including many indigenous and underrepresented languages.

Recent technological advances in genetics, such as high-throughput sequencing (HTS), have radically transformed ancient DNA (aDNA) research, making it more accessible and affordable for archaeologists than ever before. This seminar will provide a brief introduction to the field of paleogenomics, with an emphasis on the range of questions that can be addressed using current technologies, as well as some potential challenges. We will also explore how much an aDNA study actually costs and the role of student training in aDNA labs. Participants will learn how to identify questions that are amenable to genetic analysis and acquire strategies for how to set up successful collaborations with aDNA labs.