The 2020 Texas Archeological Society Annual Meeting is literally right around the corner, coming up October 29 – November 1, 2020 at the Omni Westside in Houston, Texas! This year we are privileged to announce Dr. Carolyn Boyd as our Saturday night (October 31) Banquet Speaker.

As most of you know, Dr. Boyd is the Shumla Endowed Research Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Texas State University. She is the founder of a nonprofit organization, Shumla Archaeological Research and Education Center (www.shumla.org), which was established in 1998 to preserve the oldest known “books” in North America – the rock art of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands in southwest Texas and Coahuila, Mexico.

These ancient images engraved or painted on the landscape provide a visual record of global human history. They represent a fragile and irreplaceable heritage of worldwide significance. The Lower Pecos canyonlands of southwest Texas and northern Mexico contain some of the most spectacular and complex rock art in the world, ranging in age from 4,000 years ago to the time of European contact. Information gleaned from these ancient pictorial manuscripts is not only shedding new light on Texas prehistory, but on the prehistory of North America. Join Dr. Carolyn Boyd as she presents an overview of the methods used by Shumla Archaeological Research & Education Center to preserve this important record of human history through documentation, education, stewardship, and research.

Dr. Boyd is the ex officio head of research for Shumla and serves as Vice President on the organization’s board of directors. She also is an active member of the Rock Art Network (http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/rockartnetwork/), a working group established by the Getty Conservation Institute and the Bradshaw Foundation to promote, protect, and preserve rock art globally.

Dr. Boyd received her doctorate in archaeology from Texas A&M University based on her analysis of the 4,000-year-old rock art of the Lower Pecos. She is author of Rock Art of the Lower Pecos, published in 2003 by Texas A&M University Press and The White Shaman Mural: An Enduring Creation Narrative, published in 2016 by the University of Texas Press, which received the 2017 Scholarly Book Award from the Society for American Archaeology. Dr. Boyd teaches Field Methods in Rock Art, a four-week field school offered through Texas State University and gives numerous lectures around the country and abroad.

Currently, Dr. Boyd serves as the Principal Investigator for Shumla’s Alexandria Project, a baseline documentation project of over 300 rock art sites in the Lower Pecos region. The goal is to establish a georeferenced graphic database of over 300 rock art sites. Dr. Boyd and her colleagues are using this reference library to conduct an iconographic investigation that will identify, describe, and interpret the content of these ancient murals. The information encoded in the images is sufficiently rich to inform archaeological research into territoriality, information exchange, labor organization of foragers, and the origins and tenacity of myth.

If you have any questions please contact event Co-Chairs Linda Gorski at president@txhas.org or Bob Sewell at robert-sewell@att.net We look forward to seeing you soon!