SAA offers free-to-member and fee-based online seminars every year, but there may be content that you've missed. Seminars On-Demand provides the opportunity to purchase access to past seminar recordings. This comes with many of the same advantages as live online seminars. Participants will receive access to the video recording for two months, two RPA Continuing Professional Education credit hours, and a certificate of completion. After completing your purchase, you will receive an email from SAA staff with a link to the recording and instructions for viewing. If you chose the group registration option, you will also receive information about providing access to your group (there is no maximum to the number of people who can be in your group). Please allow one business day to complete this process.
The seminar viewer should work in Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer. It will not work properly in Microsoft Edge, Safari, or on mobile. To make sure it will work on your computer, you can test out the online seminar viewer using the email address onlineseminars@saa.org and the access code 111111. You should see a short animation with music. If you have any questions, please contact onlineseminars@saa.org.
Please note that you are not registering for a live event, but rather purchasing access to a past recording. Live registrations for the options below are closed, but they are all available as an on-demand purchase.
Current On-Demand Options

Registration Closed!
Perishable Material Culture: An Introduction to Analysis and Documentation
When: February 04, 2021 1:00-3:00 PM
Duration: 2 hours
Certification: RPA-certified
Pricing
Individual Registration: $99 for SAA members; $149 for non-members
Group Registration: $139 for SAA members; $189 for non-members
Dr. Edward A. Jolie, RPA, is the director of the Perishable Artifact Laboratory at Mercyhurst University, one of only a handful of labs globally that specializes in the documentation and analysis of perishable material culture such as string, textiles, baskets, nets, and footwear. His scholarly interests include the archaeology of the Americas (with particular reference to the western U.S.), sociocultural diversity in the past and present, perishable material culture worldwide, Native American-Anthropologist relationships, and ethics in anthropology. Being of mixed Oglala Lakota (Sioux) and Hodulgee Muscogee ancestry, and an enrolled citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma, he strives to cultivate collaborative relationships and research partnerships with descendant communities.
Perishable material culture, including items such as string, nets, baskets, mats, footwear, and clothing, has been critical to human lives and livelihoods for tens of millennia, but has historically suffered from a lack of scholarly attention owing to the biases of preservation and gender. This seminar introduces participants to the diversity of perishable material culture that they may encounter in field and museum settings and provides a foundation for pursuing more intensive research on these objects. The instructor will place particular emphasis on the essential knowledge required for the proper recognition, handling, basic analysis, and documentation of perishable artifacts.
- Improve knowledge of the recognition and proper handling of perishable material culture.
- Explore the basic structural and analytical attributes of the major technological classes of perishable material culture.
- Establish the basics of perishable artifact analysis and documentation.

Registration Closed!
Grant and Research Proposal Writing for Archaeologists
When: March 05, 2019 2:00-4:00 PM
Duration: 2 hours
Certification: RPA-certified
Pricing
Individual Registration: $99 for SAA members; $149 for non-members
Group Registration: $139 for SAA members; $189 for non-members
As a professor at Boston University, John M. Marston has designed and taught a formal course for advanced doctoral students titled “Proposal Writing for Social Science Research,” in which students write from scratch actual research proposals for their doctoral research (e.g., NSF Dissertation Improvement Grants). Dr. Marston has taught a number of workshops on grant writing at Boston University and UCLA, and at UCLA served as a graduate writing consultant for the Graduate Writing Center, at which he designed and taught several workshops on writing graduate fellowship proposals. He has been the sole author or co-author of grants funded by a number of leading granting agencies and organizations, including the NSF, SSHRC, National Geographic, American Philosophical Society, and others.
This two-hour online seminar will provide archaeologists with basic advice on how to craft successful grant proposals to funding agencies (e.g., NSF) and organizations (e.g., National Geographic). The intended audience is those who are applying to such organizations for the first time or who are attempting to improve their success at attracting public funding for their research. The seminar will highlight a number of strategies for reading and responding to proposal calls, to structuring effective project narratives of varying lengths, to strengthening a proposal with supplementary information, and to revising a proposal based on reviewer feedback. It will provide examples of application strategies appropriate to funding opportunities available at multiple career stages, from those open to doctoral students to those intended for senior scholars.
- Be able to read a call for proposals to understand what is required for a given funding opportunity;
- Be familiar with what is expected for typical components of grant applications;
- Be able to apply a tailored strategy to craft a strong project narrative for a variety of funding opportunities;
- Gain strategies for successful revision and reuse of proposals, following review.

Registration Closed!
Deaccessioning Archaeological Collections
When: December 10, 2019 2:00-4:00 PM
Duration: 2 hours
Certification: RPA-certified
Pricing
Individual Registration: $99 for SAA members; $149 for non-members
Group Registration: $139 for SAA members; $189 for non-members
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.
- Learn to assess whether or not to deaccession archaeological materials and what tools are necessary to make good decisions.
- Learn the steps involved in deaccessioning, including who should be involved, the need to document every step, and the costs involved.
- Learn the opportunities afforded by the deaccessioning process, including curatorial and educational benefits.

Registration Closed!
Fundamentals of Radiocarbon Dating
When: December 16, 2019 2:00-4:00 PM
Duration: 2 hours
Certification: RPA-certified
Pricing
Individual Registration: $49 for SAA members (until June 30, 2022); $149 for non-members
Group Registration: $69 for SAA members (until June 30, 2022); $189 for non-members
- Identify what constitutes a “good” or “bad” sample for dating;
- Understand how to follow the conventions for reporting radiocarbon data in technical reports and scientific journals;
- 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;
- Assess the quality of published “legacy data” by evaluating sample context, material type, and associated metadata; and
- Avoid common mistakes and pitfalls in interpreting and communicating radiocarbon dates.

Registration Closed!
An Introduction to Geoarchaeology: How Understanding Basic Soils, Sediments, and Landforms can make you a Better Archaeologist
When: November 05, 2020 1:00-3:00 PM
Duration: 2 hours
Certification: RPA-certified
Pricing
Individual Registration: $49 for SAA members (until June 30, 2022); $149 for non-members
Group Registration: $69 for SAA members (until June 30, 2022); $189 for non-members
Teresa Wriston, Ph.D., RPA is an Assistant Research Professor and Geoarchaeologist at the Desert Research Institute. Over the past 17 years, her geoarchaeological work has focused on human adaptation to changing environments as reflected by site location, preservation, and stratigraphic contexts in the western U.S. and southern Africa.
Archaeologists know the importance of cultural context in understanding the past but often fail to recognize the importance of the natural contexts of sites, features, and artifacts in their interpretations. Looking through a geoarchaeological lens can help every archaeologist begin to understand the natural contexts of their finds. This course is designed to introduce basic geoarchaeological methods to archaeologists interested in improving their research designs, optimizing their fieldwork strategies, enhancing their stratigraphic descriptions in ways that aid component definition and sampling procedures, and using natural contexts to complement their interpretations.
- Describe what geoarchaeology is and why is it important to archaeologists
- Explain the difference between soil and sediment
- Illustrate why the position of an archaeological site on the landscape matters
- Explain how natural processes effect the archaeological record