Seniors Petra Elfström and Emily Hull along with Associate Professor of Anthropology Nathan Goodale, Assistant Professor of Anthropology Colin Quinn, Visiting Instructor of Anthropology Alissa Nauman, and several Hamilton colleagues, recently presented their research at the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) Meeting in Washington, D.C.
Majors: Archaeology and Creative Writing
Hometown: East Haddam, Conn.
High School: The Williams School
Elfström, Goodale, Nauman, Quinn, and Emily Rubinstein ’16 presented a poster titled “Sediment Geochemistry and Household Spatial Analysis: Social Organization and Housepit Floors from Three Millennia of Occupation at the Slocan Narrows Site, Interior Pacific Northwest.”
Elfström’s research concerns the geochemistry of sediments from pithouse contexts at the Slocan Narrows site in the Pacific Northwest of North America. She utilizes x-ray fluorescence and isotope ratio mass spectrometry to examine how through daily use of the space, humans influence the sediment chemistry.
Majors: Archaeology and Psychology
Hometown: New Hartford, N.Y.
High School: New Hartford High School
“Lithic Raw Materials and Social Landscapes: Mica-Lamented Quartzite Tools from Slocan Narrows, Upper Columbia River Area” was presented by Hull, Goodale, Nauman, and Quinn.
Hull’s research focuses on the microwear of mica lamented quartzite scraping tools from the Slocan Narrows site. She conducted experiments using replicated scrapers to perform a variety of tasks and then compared the microscopic usewear patterns of the experimental tools to those recovered from archaeological contexts.
Elfström and Hull participated in the 2017 Archaeology Field Course at the Slocan Narrows excavation site in British Columbia. Samples for their senior thesis projects presented at the SAA meeting were gathered at that site.
The students’ conference participation was made possible through travel funding from the Dean of Faculty and Class of 1979 Travel Grants.
