SDAC Events

Join us every 2nd Saturday of the month for two screenings of our Living Room Lectures by archaeologists, experts, and authors. Lecture screenings start at 10:30 AM and 12:30 PM and are included with museum admission. No reservations needed. Seating is first come, first served. 10:30 AM - Ethnozoology of the Kumeyaay People by Richard Carrico For the Kumeyaay people of San Diego County, animals, birds, insects, and other creatures hold a special place in the cosmos and played a variety of important roles. Their embodiment is not always easily visualized because some creatures, large and small, exist in worlds not always seen by most humans, and rarely acknowledged by archaeologists. For many of the native people, there was a time when animals were actually human. In the mythic, ancient time what we now know as humans, or more correctly as mortals, did not exist. The world was inhabited by animals and by animals who were humans but not mortals—these were the Early People and some creatures could embody traits of what came to be known as the mortal humans and animals. Only later in time did the separation grow between animals and humans, and at that time the humans became mortal. This presentation will provide an analysis and discussion of the role and place of non-human creatures within the world and cosmos of the Kumeyaay people of San Diego County. 12:30 PM - The First Chicken Burrito in Western North America: Zooarchaeology of Avian Remains for the San Diego Royal Presidio by Dr. Aharon Sasson The San Diego Presidio, established in AD 1769, was the first European settlement in Upper California. Very little is known about chicken husbandry in colonial America, which makes this study the first comprehensive analysis of chicken remains in North America. Chickens are scarcely mentioned in historical accounts describing early California, and information on their sex, age, or management is rare. Small-scale poultry production, likely managed by women and children, provided California presidios with a form of subsistence independence.

Join us every 2nd Saturday of the month for two screenings of our Living Room Lectures by archaeologists, experts, and authors. Lecture screenings start at 10:30 AM and 12:30 PM and are included with museum admission. No reservations needed. Seating is first come, first served. 10:30 AM - It’s Grind Time! Recent Investigations of the Ancestral Maya Ground Stone Tool Industry in the Mountain Pine Ridge Forest Reserve, Belize by Dr. Jon Spenard While conducting opportunistic regional survey in summer 2022 in the Mountain Pine Ridge Forest Reserve, Belize, Dr. Jon Spenard’s Rio Frio Regional Archaeological Project was informed of a series of granitic rock debitage piles nearby. Investigations revealed them to be ancestral Maya quarries and ground stone tool workshops, the first of their kind recorded anywhere in the Maya region. Naming the site the Buffalo Hill Quarries, the project mapped over a dozen extraction features (quarry pits and cut faces) surrounded by debitage piles spread over an area of approximately 16 hectares (40 acres). Aided by data from an aerial LiDAR survey of the region, the project returned in summer 2023 to finish mapping the site and conduct test excavations on an extraction locus to investigate ancestral Maya quarrying methods and techniques. In this talk, Dr. Spenard will present the results of those two field seasons, introduce more results from the LiDAR survey, and discuss the next stages of the project, including examining who the quarry workers were and how their products may have been distributed. 12:30 PM - The Skeletons of La Consentida, Oaxaca, Mexico by José “Pepe” Aguilar Twelve burials, comprising 14 individuals, were excavated from an Early Formative Period (1950–1525 BC) site called La Consentida, in Oaxaca, Mexico in 2009 and in 2012. These burials were later analyzed in 2012 and 2019. Collectively, they represent the earliest formal cemetery in the Mesoamerican west coast. Note: this presentation will show photographs of human skeletal remains.

Join us every 2nd Saturday of the month for two screenings of our Living Room Lectures by archaeologists, experts, and authors. Lecture screenings start at 10:30 AM and 12:30 PM and are included with museum admission. No reservations needed. Seating is first come, first served. 10:30 AM - Hominins, Hyenas, and Lions: Zooarchaeological Evidence for Meat Eating by Oldowan Hominins by Jennifer Parkinson The shift to increased meat consumption is one of the major adaptive changes in hominin dietary evolution and likely had important repercussions for the behavior of our early hominin ancestors. Meat-eating by hominins is well documented at Early Pleistocene (Oldowan) archaeological sites in East Africa by butchery marks on bones. While it is established that Oldowan hominins butchered mammal carcasses, there has been disagreement about whether these carcasses were hunted or scavenged, as well as disagreement about the nature of competition between hominins and large carnivores. The 2-million-year-old zooarchaeological assemblage from Kanjera South (Kenya) offers some of the earliest evidence of routine butchery of mammal carcasses by early members of the genus Homo. Bone surface modifications indicate that hominins were likely not passively scavenging from carnivore kills, but instead gaining early access to prey either through hunting or confrontational scavenging. Modern studies of lion feeding ecology are also shedding additional light on the potential for hominin-carnivore competitive interactions in the past. 12:30 PM - 21st-Century Historical Archaeology and the Next Generation of Community Engagement at the Nathan Harrison Site by Dr. Seth Mallios This talk examines how the archaeology at the Nathan Harrison Site has inspired a new generation of muralists, historians, playwrights, and others to create innovative works and continued relevance for Harrison’s evolving narratives. It offers an overview of the project, a brief biography of San Diego's first African American homesteader, an explanation of his dual identity, code-switching, and historical minstrelsy, and a discussion of the project’s case for significance beyond the dig including public exhibits, educational curricula, and creative arts.