Jennie Sturm, doctoral candidate in Archaeology, will present the Ruth Kennedy Memorial Lecture on Thursday, September 26 at 4 pm in the Hibben Center lecture hall, room 105.  Her talk, entitled Chaco’s Hidden Landscapes: Using Archaeological Remote Sensing to Map Patterns of Land Use will discuss archaeological remote sensing, which includes a suite of methods that can access information about the archaeological record in ways that are not possible otherwise. In Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, locating land use patterns that could be used to understand agriculture during the period of emergent social complexity referred to as the Bonito Phase (ca. AD 850-1150) has been an enduring problem. This talk presents the methodological strategy developed for locating and mapping land use patterns at Chaco and evaluates how these patterns can contribute to our understanding of agriculture in the canyon. Through a combination of remote sensing methods, including ground-based geophysics and aerial photography, Chaco’s “hidden” landscapes can be accessed to become part of the empirical archaeological record. 

This talk is free and open to the public.