Spring Potlatch with Dr. Todd Surovell

Friday, April 7, 6 – 9 pm, at Granby Community and Senior Center, FREE

GCHA Spring Potlatch with extraordinary speaker, Dr. Todd Surovell
Please bring a dish to share.

Title: From Middle Park to Mongolia: How Mongolian Reindeer Herders Can Inform Us About Folsom Archaeology

The Dukha Ethnoarchaeological Project (DEP) was Inspired by ten years of fieldwork at Barger Gulch, Locality B, a Folsom site near Kremmling, Colorado. At Barger Gulch, we excavated large contiguous areas and recovered tens of thousands of artifacts. The focus of our work was the spatial and social organization of a Folsom campsite. After countless hours of spatial analysis, Dr. Surovell found that spatial patterns were easy to identify at Barger Gulch, but understanding their significance for past human behavior was difficult.

This problem led to the development of the DEP, the focus of which is the study of how nomadic peoples use space within their campsites. Specifically, in the campsites of reindeer herders in northern Mongolia, Dr. Surovell studies how people decide where to do what they do, and how those decisions are manifested spatially in the archaeological record. For more information on Dr. Surovell’s Mongolia expeditions, please follow the Dukha Ethnoarchaeological Project at https://sites.google.com/site/dukhaethnoarch/