Pacific Coast
Archaeological Society

PCAS General Meetings

Monthly lecture meetings feature noted archaeologists and anthropologists who provide insight into a variety of topics. Lecture meetings are held at the Irvine Ranch Water District Community Room, 15500 Sand Canyon Avenue (between the I-5 and I-405) in Irvine, on the second Thursday of each month, at 7:30 pm. Meetings are free and open to the public. See vicinity and detail maps of PCAS meeting location.

The Irvine Ranch Water District neither supports nor endorses the causes or activities of organizations

that use the District’s meeting rooms which are made available for public use.

PCAS Zoom Meetings  

• Email a registration request to membership@pcas.org by noon on the day of the meeting.
• You will receive an email shortly with a link to the Zoom meeting.
• Guests (non-PCAS members) are welcome with registration.
• When the presentation starts, please mute your microphone and turn off your webcam.

December 8, 2022 Holiday Meeting: IRWD Duck Club (Directions), 7 pm. Bring dessert/snack to share.

Zoom Meeting starts at 7:30 pm (Speaker will not be present at the in-person meeting, but will appear via Zoom.)

Dr. Timothy Rowe

A Surprise Encounter with 37,000-Year-Old Mammoths in My Backyard 

In 2013 a partial mammoth skeleton was discovered on land that Dr. Rowe and his wife had purchased years earlier on the Colorado Plateau in northern New Mexico. Approaching the site as a geologist and paleontologist, Dr. Rowe was surprised as excavation of the site revealed the systematically fragmented remains of a young adult female and a calf. Evidence from the excavation, from computed tomography scans (CT and µCT) of bone breakage patterns, and matrix particles pointed to the strong likelihood that this is a butchering site. Although its age challenges prevalent archaeological views on timing of the human occupation of the Americas, independent genomic analyses using modern and ancient human DNA had already provided evidence of at least one human dispersal into the Americas that predated the arrival of the Native American clade by millennia. The age of this site is congruent with molecular clock estimates of an early human dispersal into the Americas. It provides a deep point of chronologic reference for occupation of the Americas and for attainment by humans of a near-global distribution. 

Dr Timothy Rowe is a paleontologist who specializes in the vertebrate skeleton in all its forms, from fossils to Recent species, and from embryos to adults. His research encompasses the theory and application of phylogenetic systematics, which he uses to explore co-evolution of the vertebrate genome and phenome. He is also a leader in developing and exploiting digital tools that augment and extend our ability to analyze and visualize the skeleton along with the ‘soft’ tissues that the skeleton supports. Dr. Rowe is a co-founding Director of the University of Texas High-Resolution X-ray Computed Tomography Facility, an NSF Multiuser facility that has served a global audience for 25 years. He was the Founding Director of the Center for Instructional Technologies, he directed the Vertebrate Paleontology Laboratory for 16 years, and is the Director of Digital Morphology (www.DigiMorph.org), an NSF Digital Library at the University of Texas.

Dr. Rowe’s research and training efforts have been funded by the National Science Foundation continuously since 1985. He was also granted research awards by the Thomas J. Watson Foundation, W. M. Keck Foundation, Intel Foundation, National Chemical Society, and Texas Advanced Technologies Program.

Field research is a major part of Prof. Rowe’s research interests. He has conducted field work in Mexico, Europe, and South Africa, but his specialty is the American Southwest, where he has worked in Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous, and Cenozoic terrestrial deposits from across the region.  In 2013 he became involved in an ongoing early archaeological site in the Pleistocene of New Mexico.

Dr. Rowe joined the University of Texas faculty in 1986, after earning an AB degree (Geology major, with minor emphasis in Biology) from Occidental College (1975), an MS (Anatomy) from the University of Chicago (1981), and a Ph.D. (Paleontology) from the University of California, Berkeley (1986).  He is a Fellow of the Thomas J. Watson Foundation and the US National Museum of Natural History. His publication record can be found on Google Scholar.

January 12, 2023

In-Person and Zoom Meeting (Speaker will be present at the in-person meeting.)

Joyce Stanfield Perry

Where We Bow Our Heads

The Acjachemen/Juaneño are the indigenous people of Orange County. Interconnectedness to place and to land is an essential part of the Acjachemen world view. The legacy of colonialism and development has led to the destruction of many of our ancient villages and sacred sites. I will share a personal perspective, as an Acjachemen woman, through reflections of my experiences on the site of the ancient village at Bolsa Chica. I will share what I learned as I observed the land being forever altered at the expense of this sacred site.