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A large group of Hamilton students, alumni and faculty attended and presented at the 82nd Annual Society for American Archaeology (SAA) meeting that took place March 29th to April 2nd in Vancouver, B.C.

After 28 years as a professor of archaeology at Hamilton College, most people would be content with taking some time off. Not Charlotte Beck. “Just because I’ve retired from teaching doesn’t mean I’ve retired from archaeology,” she said. Beck is currently on sabbatical before officially retiring at the end of the 2012-13 academic year, and is living in Taos, New Mexico, where she is finalizing an upcoming monograph that she has co-authored with her husband, Leavenworth Professor of Anthropology Tom Jones.

As is the custom at Hamilton, the Dean of Faculty recognizes retiring faculty and hosts a reception in their honor at the last faculty meeting of the academic year. On May 16, Dean of Faculty Patrick Reynolds honored four professors retiring this year: Professor of  Anthropology Charlotte Beck; Jim Bradfield, the Elias W. Leavenworth Professor of Economics; Professor of Government Ted Eismeier; and  Jay Williams ’54, the Walcott-Bartlett Professor of Religious Studies. Following are the tributes Reynolds read.

Papers by Professor of Anthropology Tom Jones, Professor of Archaeology Charolotte Beck and Professor of Geosciences David Bailey were published in the April issue of American Antiquity. The quarterly journal is published by the Society for American Archaeology.

Hamilton College archaeologists were well-represented on the program of the 77th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology held April 18-22 in Memphis, Tenn. Several students, faculty members and alumni presented research with other Hamilton alumni in attendance.

Professor of Archaeology Charlotte Beck and Professor of Anthropology Tom Jones have published chapters in two new books from the University of Utah Press.

Assistant Professor of Anthropology Nathan Goodale and Professors of Anthropology Tom Jones and Charlotte Beck recently published an article titled “Natural Selection and Material Culture” in a special edition of the journal Evolution: Education and Outreach.

Professor of Anthropology Charlotte Beck was quoted in the journal Science, in LiveScience, in The Oregonian and in U.S. News & World Report about a study, published in the journal Science on March 4, that raised questions about how prehistoric peoples, upon their arrival from Asia, journeyed south to the Americas. Beck and Professor of Anthropology Tom Jones published a paper in 2010 that concluded that the initial colonization of the intermountain region of the Great Basin was probably by populations from the Pacific coastal area and not, as conventional wisdom holds, from the Great Plains.