SCRAP has a number of upcoming presentations at various conferences this spring and summer.

Dr. Howie (HD Analytical Solutions)

Next week (Friday, March 31), Drs. Meaghan Peuramäki-Brown and Linda Howie will be presenting results of their recent ceramic petrography research at Alabama at the 82nd Annual Meetings of the Society for American Archaeology in Vancouver. Their talk is titled “Pre-Columbian Pottery and Building Materials of the East-Central Belize Maya: A Petrographic Characterization Study.” Preliminary conference program can be accessed here.

For the April talk of the monthly Archaeological Society of Alberta – Calgary Centre lecture series, Dr. Peuramäki-Brown will be discussing “Ancient Maya Settlement and Resource Development in East-Central Belize.” This will take place on Wednesday, April 19th at 7:30pm at the University of Calgary. Visit the ASA website for more details.

Dr. Peuramäki-Brown has also recently been added to the program for this year’s Maya at the Lago conference in North Carolina at the end of April. She will be talking about “The Ancient Maya of East-Central Belize,” with a particular focus on the early work of Dr. Elizabeth Graham in the Stann Creek District, and SCRAP research over the past 3 years. Dr. Graham’s career is being honoured at this year’s conference. Check the conference website regularly for updates.

Dr. Paris (University of Calgary)

At the 50th Annual Meetings of the Canadian Archaeological Association in Ottawa this May, Megan Williams (Athabasca University undergraduate student) and Drs. Elizabeth Paris, Tristan Carter, and Meaghan Peuramäki-Brown, will be presenting results of two years of obsidian sourcing research at Alabama. This paper represents a multi-institutional collaboration and is titled “The Implications of Obsidian Source Analysis to Occupation Chronology and Economic Relations at Alabama, Belize”. It is part of a session that celebrates Canadians in Belizean archaeology, titled “Celebrating Canadian Participation in Belizean Archaeology: 50 Years and Still Going Strong!” Also part of this session is a paper by Drs. Peuramäki-Brown and Graham, titled “The Archaeology of Industry in Stann Creek: ancient and recent past, present and future prospects.”

At the end of June, our 2016 field crew  (Drs. Peuramäki-Brown & Shawn Morton, Cristina Oliveira, Kelsey Pennanen, Virginia Chiac, Teaghan Koster and Megan Williams) will be presenting in San Ignacio, Belize at the Belize Archaeology Symposium. “‘Some lessons can’t be taught, they simply have to be learned’: Experiences from archaeological survey and testing at Alabama, Stann Creek District” is the title of their talk.

Finally, we promise that our 2016 Field Report will be available on our website at the end of June. We will not be returning to the field until 2018, as project members are busy writing up various publications about results of our Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) funded research from the past two years. We will, however, be meeting in June with organizers of the Stann Creek House of Culture in Dangriga to discuss future collaborations with their team.

That’s it for now. We wish everyone a wonderful spring!

Team SCRAP