2025 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of David J. Meltzer Part II

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mikkel Pedersen.

This is an abstract from the "2025 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of David J. Meltzer Part II" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Meadowcroft Rockshelter, located near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is a significant archaeological site excavated by James Adovasio and his team from 1973 to 1978. The site contains stratified layers of artifacts and charcoal dating from the Historic period back to approximately 17,300 years ago, suggesting early...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eske Willerslev.

This is an abstract from the "2025 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of David J. Meltzer Part II" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During this talk I will introduce the Ancient Environmental Genomics Initiative for Sustainability (AEGIS) aimed at accelerating and delivering new strategies for developing resilient crops and agricultural systems and hence mitigate the risk of a human food crisis in the face of climate changes. This ambitious...

DOCUMENT Citation Only José Víctor Moreno Mayar.

This is an abstract from the "2025 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of David J. Meltzer Part II" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Americas were the last continent to be reached by anatomically modern humans. Thanks to large-scale genomic studies, archaeology, anthropology and geology we have a broad understanding of the process whereby the ancestors of present-day Indigenous Americans originated in Northeast Asia, reached the continent...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James O'Connell.

This is an abstract from the "2025 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of David J. Meltzer Part II" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pleistocene Sahul, the continent created when falling sea levels opened a dry land connection between New Guinea and Australia, was first colonized by anatomically modern Homo sapiens c. 47-51 ka. A small number of sites beyond this age in the north, south and west of Australia, including two claimed to be...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Adler.

This is an abstract from the "2025 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of David J. Meltzer Part II" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the challenges in collaborative community-based anthropological research is finding mutually beneficial pathways for the host community, and those invited to conduct research, to simultaneously support both sovereignty (host community) and research integrity (outside researchers). For example, what happens...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jane Buikstra.

This is an abstract from the "2025 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of David J. Meltzer Part II" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In his carefully researched tome, The Great Paleolithic War (2015), David Meltzer demonstrates a remarkable depth of scholarship, carefully reading and evaluating 66 reference pages of primary sources. Included were 15 scholarly works by Aleš Hrdlička. Meltzer has thus critically engaged with the research...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael O'Brien.

This is an abstract from the "2025 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of David J. Meltzer Part II" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. It is difficult, if not downright impossible, to even begin to summarize the contributions Dave Meltzer has made to archaeology. I’ve long regarded him as the twenty-first-century heir to William Henry Holmes’s mantle. Few people have been as successful in pulling together truly interdisciplinary, as opposed to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Curtis Hinsley.

This is an abstract from the "2025 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of David J. Meltzer Part II" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologist David Wilcox and historian Curtis Hinsley met at the Harvard Peabody Museum in 1983 and found a common interest in the Hemenway Expedition of the 1880s, led by Frank Hamilton Cushing. They contracted with the University of Arizona Press for a seven-volume history of the expedition, based upon an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Goodrum.

This is an abstract from the "2025 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of David J. Meltzer Part II" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As paleontologists and archaeologists began to find flint artifacts in Pleistocene deposits in France and Britain in the 1860s, followed soon thereafter by human fossils and Paleolithic art objects, researchers across Europe raced to discover further evidence for Paleolithic Europeans. In Moravia, now part of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Greger Larson.

This is an abstract from the "2025 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of David J. Meltzer Part II" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The first animal or plant with which humans formed a strong commensal relationship with was the wolf. This interaction led to dogs, the first of many domestic animals on which we now rely. Using the latest data from archaeological and scientific techniques including ancient DNA, I’ll detail what we know about how...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anne Stone.

This is an abstract from the "2025 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of David J. Meltzer Part II" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study aims to understand the genetic history of early archaic Chinchorro and later agricultural populations from northern Chile and to assess the impact of agriculture on the oral microbiome. We collected teeth (n=125) and dental calculus (n=70) samples from coastal and inland sites spanning 7,000-500 years...

DOCUMENT Citation Only R. Lyman.

This is an abstract from the "2025 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of David J. Meltzer Part II" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The concept ‘artifact’ is arguably the core concept of archaeology; without artifacts it is doubtful there would be an archaeology discipline as we know it today. Three questions warrant exploration: First, what is the history of how we determine that particular things are artifacts? Second, what is the history...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Roger Echo-Hawk.

This is an abstract from the "2025 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of David J. Meltzer Part II" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The bestowing of the SAA 2025 Fryxell Award on David Meltzer honors an intellectually panoramic legacy of scholarship. Dr Meltzer is a key advocate for adhering to both rigorous analytical standards and cordial critical dialogue – his work has enlightened my own intellectual journeys since the early 1990s. In...