Last week, students and faculty from the Department of Anthropology, Geospatial and Earth Sciences (AGES) participated in both the eighty-first annual meeting of the Southeastern Archaeological Conference (SEAC) in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and the Council for Northeast Historical Archaeology (CNEHA) annual meeting in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania.
Elena Vories, Ryan Devanny, Brenden Patterson, Savannah Weinrich, and Andrea Palmiotto attended SEAC, where they presented four posters. Three of the posters were part of an organized session about Green’s Shell Enclosure, a Mississippian site on Hilton Head Island in South Carolina. The authors collaborated with archaeologists from SCDNR’s Heritage Trust Program and with representatives from Muscogee and Catawba Nations on the field work and presentations.
These posters included:
- McDorman S, Smith K, and Palmiotto A. Implementing Tribal consultation and NAGPRA-aware field practices at Green’s Shell Enclosure (38BU63), Beaufort County, South Carolina.
- Patterson B, Palmiotto A. Characterizing oyster and vertebrate faunal use at Green’s Shell Enclosure.
- Vories E. A study of Mississippian shell site occupation: analyzing subsurface anomalies detected through ground penetrating radar and their chronological associations at Green’s Shell Enclosure.
A fourth poster included IUP Anthropology undergraduate Bella Shrewsbury:
- Palmiotto A, Devanny R, Schmidt A, Shrewsbury B, and Buzzelli E. Sea catfish (Ariidae) pectoral and dorsal fin spine tools from the ACE Basin between 5,000 and 3,500 years BP.
IUP was represented at CNEHA by Elena Frye, James Duke, Abdul Jones, and Ben Ford, all four of whom presented on recent research projects. Jones, Duke, and Frye’s papers presented portions of their Applied Archaeology MA theses:
- Duke J. The John “Jack” Hopkins House: Excavating the African Diaspora in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
- Frye E. Geophysical Investigations at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (Hanover, PA).
- Jones A. Brown’s Farm: An Archaeological Investigation of an African American Farmstead in Cambria County, Pennsylvania.
- Ford B. Borderland to Heartland: Western Pennsylvania in the Late 18th and Early 19th Centuries.
Abdul Jones with 2025 CNEHA Student Paper Prize
Jones won the 2025 CNEHA Student Paper Prize based on a combination of his written paper and oral presentation.