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Anna Arnn, who was featured on the cover of the SAA Archaeological Record in Sept. 2015, was among the award recipients.

Four students have been awarded Class of 1979 Travel grants.

Anna Arnn ’17, Lindsay Buff ’17, Emily Hull ’18 and Mariah Walzer ’17 were each awarded funds to attend the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) meeting in Vancouver, Canada, in 2017. They will present posters about research conducted at Slocan Narrows Pithouse Village in British Columbia, Canada, during past summers. 

This SAA meeting will have a particular focus on archaeology of the Pacific Northwest.

The award, established by the alumni of Hamilton’s Class of 1979, offers financial assistance to outstanding students who wish to pursue extensive research projects in different parts of the world.

Arnn attended the Hamilton field school in British Columbia during the summer of 2015. After that, Dr. Matthew Walsh trained her in faunal analysis (the identification of animal remains at archaeological sites) at the University of Montana. Last summer, she identified and analyzed the 230 faunal remains that were uncovered during the field school. Further analysis of these remains will be a component of the research for her thesis.

Arnn will also work to recreate the isotope ecology of the Slocan Narrows Pithouse Village. She will analyze fauna specimens from across the breadth of species found at the Slocan Narrows site, an aboriginal pithouse village occupied from 3,100 cal BP to the late 18th century in the Upper Columbia River area of the interior Pacific Northwest.

Lindsay Buff '17
Lindsay Buff ’17 at work at the Slocan Narrows Archaeological Project during Hamilton’s summer field school.

Lindsay Buff, a geosciences /archaeology double major, has been conducting research on the fine-grained volcanic (FGV) artifact assemblage recovered from Housepit 54, Bridge River Housepit Village in British Columbia, Canada, in conjunction with Hamilton Professors David Bailey and Nathan Goodale  and University of Montana professor Anna Prentiss.

Buff’s project uses hand-held portable x-ray fluorescence (HHpXRF) and wavelength-dispersive x-ray fluorescence (WDXRF) to chemically analyze FGV artifacts from each floor of Housepit 54 in an effort to draw conclusions about the shifting patterns in toolstone sources and the use-life of the pithouse. 

At the conference, she will present a poster of her research conducted over the past two years, focusing on the matches made between FGV artifacts and toolstone source locales as part of a poster session dedicated specifically to the excavation and analysis on Housepit 54.

Emily Hull and Mariah Walzer will present a paper titled “Prehistoric mobility patterns and geochemistry of FGV toolstones at Slocan Narrows Pithouse Village and the Upper Columbia River area.”  

Emily Hull '18
Emily Hull '18. Photo: Mike Verostek '16

Hull has been conducting use-wear analysis on a lithic assemblage of mica-lamented quartzite scrapers, artifacts recovered from field school excavation at the Slocan Narrows Pithouse Village in Slocan, British Columbia. She is seeking to determine their function and the reason for their transportation over 200km from Kettle Falls, Wash., to the site in which they were found.

 

walzer
Mariah Walzer '17

Walzer’s research for the presentation focuses on fine-grained volcanic artifacts. Previous work on source provenance with non-destructive portable X-ray fluorescence technology (pXRF), which uses x-rays to determine the elemental composition of rocks, has yielded inconclusive results. Her project takes a sample of FGV artifacts and analyzes them using Hamilton's new, more accurate wavelength dispersive XRF (WDXRF) lab technology.

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