DFC-AAS: February 12 – John Welch
PhD John Welch presents, Building a Model for Community-Based Archaeological Resource Protection: The White Mountain Apache Experiment. Despite several generations of countermeasures, looting and grave robbing continue to damage and desecrate cultural resources across the United States and around the world. Native American Indian tribes generally value cultural resources as ancestral footprints and wellsprings of community identity, as well as data sources. For this reason, and because cultural resource sites are not partitioned from living communities on tribal lands, as they are on federal and state lands, tribes are disproportionately threatened and impacted by archaeological resource crime. New means and methods are being developed in close partnership with the White Mountain Apache tribe to prevent, investigate, and remediate looting in one of Arizona’s most beautiful and important cultural resource regions.
John R. Welch directs Archaeology Southwest’s Landscape and Site Protection Program and is a professor, jointly appointed in The Department of Archaeology and the School of Resource and Environmental Management at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. Welch works with Native Nations on projects at the interface of indigenous peoples’ sovereignty—rights and responsibilities derived from authority over people and territory—and stewardship—sustainable and broadly beneficial uses of sociocultural and biophysical inheritances. John Welch is a founding member of the board for the Fort Apache Heritage Foundation. He publishes on Apache history and applied archaeology and directs SFU Archaeology’s online Professional Graduate Program in Heritage Resource Management. PhD John R Welch earned a Masters (1985) and Doctorate in Anthropology (1996) from the University of Arizona, after earning a Bachelors in Anthropology (Honors), Spanish, Hamilton College, Clinton, New York in 1983.
The public may attend an Arizona Archaeology Society – Desert Foothills Chapter meeting at no charge, except for the holiday party in December. The AAS-DFC meetings are held on the second Wednesday of each month, September through May. There are refreshments available at 7:00 PM and the meeting begins at 7:30 PM, usually ending prior to 9:00 PM.
Reception and socialization at 7:00 pm, program begins approximately 7:30 pm.
