Congratulations to Alicia Valentino…

On Friday (08/25/06) the successful defense of her dissertation on the industrial archaeology of Van Winkle’s Mill made Alicia Valentino the FIRST Ph.D. in anthropology produced by the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. Alicia’s committee included Drs. George Sabo (chair), Kenneth Kvamme, Thomas Green, and Leslie “Skip” Stewart-Abernathy. I was there as were several other friends and colleagues to show support to Dr. Valentino and to witness a moment of history….granted, it was a small moment of history, but it was certainly one that had been decades in the making.

Drs. Stewart-Abernathy, Tom Green, Ken Kvamme, and George Sabo (standing) await the beginning of Alicia's (standing in black dress) defense.

The End of An Era…

Below you see 9 years of my life on a table–the Van Winkle’s Mill Archeological Project collection. I started this project in October of 1997 with Jerry Hilliard & James Davidson, and I “finished” it (barring new plans by Arkansas State Parks) with Alicia Valentino in October of 2005.

Today I prepared all 81 boxes of it for final curation and hauled into the curation facility at the Coordinating Office of the Arkansas Archeological Survey in Fayetteville.

That’s alright…I’ve been ready for some new research projects for a long time now… Goodbye Northwest Arkansas, southwestern Arkansas here I come!

Packing, Websites, etc….

Well…I’m currently back in Northwest Arkansas–packing books, tying up loose ends on my NWA projects (i.e., getting Van Winkle’s Mill into the curation facility) and assorted other things related to the Magnolia move.

Another thing I’ve been working on are a set of web pages for the SAU Research Station–currently only the SAU and UAM station do not have some sort of web presence…well, I’ll fix that!

You can check out the design as it progresses….eventually it will live on the AAS station pages or on the SAU server, but for now the pages are a part of our collaborative Project Past site…check them out & send any design/content comments you have to me.

http://www.projectpast.org/sau/

Summer Fun

As the spring semester winds down and the summer semesters begin, I’ll not be posting as much as I have been this spring. I’ll be helping out at an archeological fieldschool at Van Winkle’s Mill during the first summer semester & working on a monograph of the work we’ve been doing at Van Winkle’s Mill the second part of the summer. I may get around to posting a few things as time frees up & subjects avail themselves. . . but you’ll hear a lot less of me until then.

See you in the fall,

jamie