Simmons at DRI: Years of Famine and Triumph

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Pushing the Envelope, Chasing Stone Age Sailors and Early Agriculture: Papers in Honor of the Career of Alan H. Simmons" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Prior to his long and distinguished professorial career at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, Alan Simmons spent eight years in Reno at the Desert Research Institute (DRI), an independent soft-money component of Nevada’s university system. For a young Near Eastern Neolithic archaeologist to be reliant on Great Basin cultural resource management contracts was a formidable challenge, but one he negotiated with enviable élan (and barely-discernible anxiety). The crush of scarce projects and high overhead always loomed, but Alan’s DRI time was marked by singular research successes including his work at Akrotiri Aetokremnos. This paper briefly remembers Alan’s time at DRI. Then, because Alan is at heart a dirt archaeologist with a long-standing interest in island prehistory, I consider the early Holocene history of Isla Cedros, Baja California, its transition from a peninsula to an island, and implications for early occupation there.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Pushing the Envelope, Chasing Stone Age Sailors and Early Agriculture: Papers in Honor of the Career of Alan H. Simmons

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23404