The 68th Annual Plains Anthropological Conference will take place Oct. 6-9 in Bismarck. Hosted by the State Historical Society of North Dakota, conference headquarters will be at the Radisson Inn. The conference will include paper and poster sessions and symposia, a ceramics workshop, a reception at the North Dakota Heritage Center, guided bus tours, and a banquet.
Sessions and symposia are scheduled for all day Oct. 7-8 and the morning of Oct. 9. Papers and posters will cover a variety of topics, including archaeology, cultural anthropology, ethnology, history, linguistics and physical anthropology. One competitive paper session will feature research of college students. The ceramics workshop will be presented by three professional archaeologists with demonstrations of prehistoric pottery methods of manufacture. Guided bus tours are scheduled on Oct. 6 and Oct. 9. The daylong Wednesday tour will travel to the Knife River flint quarries in central North Dakota and the Double Ditch State Historic Site north of Bismarck. Seats are no longer available for the Wednesday tour. The Saturday afternoon tour will travel to Huff State Historic Site, Chief Looking's (Ward) Village, and Double Ditch, all along the Missouri River. The tours will be led by professional archaeologists who have conducted research at these sites.
The conference banquet will be held Friday evening at the Radisson. The speaker will be Dr. Elizabeth Fenn, the E. Blake Byrne associate professor of history at Duke University. She received her undergraduate degree from Duke in 1981 and Ph.D. from Yale in 1999. Her field of study is early North America, focusing particularly on epidemic disease, American Indian history, and social history. Her book "Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82" received the 2003 Longman-History Today Book of the Year Award, the 2002 James J. Broussard First Book Prize, and the 2004 Society of the Cincinnati Book Prize. Fenn is currently working on a book titled "Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People," which explores the changes that swept the northern Great Plains in the eras of colonization and the early republic.
Registration is available online at www.history.nd .
gov/plainsconference. For more information about the 68th Annual Plains Anthropological Conference, contact Co-chairs Amy Bleier, State Historical Society of North Dakota research archaeologist ( ableier@nd
ADVERTISEMENT
.gov) and Paul Picha, SHSND chief archaeologist ( ppicha@nd.gov ).
The conference is an annual event of the Plains Anthropological Society, a non-profit organization which promotes anthropological study of the Great Plains. More information about the Plains Anthropological Society is available at www.ou.edu/cas/archsur/plainsanth .
