Upcoming Seminars

Gabriela Oré Menéndez is a doctoral candidate at Vanderbilt University. She has been the social media co-chair of SAA's Queer Archaeology Interest Group and one of the webmasters of the Queer Archaeology web page since 2017. She has given invited talks at universities in Peru and the United States on the topic of Queer Archaeology. She has developed and given workshops and syllabi for complete courses for the undergraduate level on Queer Theory and Anthropology.

Queer Archaeology is a way to question the approach and biases of the discipline of archaeology. The topic has regained traction twenty years after the publication of the journal of World Archaeology special issue on Queer Archaeologies. This one hour-long seminar will discuss how to apply the concepts of Queer Theory to archaeological contexts and how to make archaeological practice more welcoming to folks from all genders and sexualities.

The Rising Scholars seminars are opportunities to learn from students and early career archaeologists as they share their current research or emerging methods and theories.

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.

1. Improve knowledge of the recognition and proper handling of perishable material culture.
2. Explore the basic structural and analytical attributes of the major technological classes of perishable material culture.
3. Establish the basics of perishable artifact analysis and documentation.

Dr. Kayeleigh Sharp, RPA, is an anthropological archaeologist trained in the four-field approach with an active research agenda in northern coastal Peru. Currently, she is an Instructional Development Specialist in the Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE), at Southern Illinois University, which allows her to work closely with faculty as a collaborator and/or course development coach. In her role at CTE, her areas of specialization are interactive-immersive content development, object-based learning, and course objectives alignment. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Sharp was part of a six-person team that helped hundreds of faculty successfully transition from in-person to remote teaching over the course of two weeks. She has coached numerous individual faculty members of diverse ranks and fields as they to move from "online triage courses" to full-semester online courses.

Early in 2020, educators and pupils throughout the world made the necessary and abrupt transition to remote teaching and distance learning. Understandably, the foundations of archaeology and other sciences normally taught in labs or through hand-on experiences were badly shaken. But the multitude of forced pivots we have recently experienced provide a critical roadmap as we find ourselves in the midst of a paradigmatic shift in education. In this up-to-date seminar, attendees will become familiar with formerly unfamiliar terminology and pedagogical ideas about online learning that have come to the forefront over the past several months in our archaeology classrooms. In this seminar, participants will learn the basics of using interactive tools such as SCORMS (Sharable Content Object Reference Models) and interactive maps. Participants will be provided with a set of open source tools and new tips and tricks to engage and retain online learners more productively, consistently, and effectively in their new classes and beyond. This hour-long seminar is aimed at both experienced educators who may be teaching courses online for the first time as well as new instructors who wish to put their innovative ideas into practice.

Participants will learn how to:

1. Plan an online archaeology or related course using available technologies and content.
2. Deliver an online archaeology or related course using available technologies and content.
3. Engage learners in ways that are productive, effective, and sustainable.