Welcome back to another semester at IUP! The students have conquered their first week of classes, and the blog is back online. Our first three weeks will have multiple colloquiums for students to attend. Last week, we had a great turnout for Dr. Ervan Garrison’s SAA webinar on sedimentology. His presentation served as a great introduction to deposition processes and analysis of sediments. Students got a sneak peak of some of the topics that would be covered in the geoarchaeology course planned for the next school year. This week, we will have Dr. Nina Schreiner of the South Carolina Institute for Archaeology and Anthropology speaking to students about the NAGPRA rule changes that went into effect at the beginning of 2024. Next week, students will be able to attend another SAA webinar on consultation partnerships presented by Dr. Laurie Rush. As first-year students attend their first course on Cultural Resource Management and second-year students begin CRM II, it’s important to remember and emphasize the human relationships at work behind the abstractions of theory and the cold calculations of law. More events coming down the pipeline include presentations of student papers and our mock ethics bowl. Plans for later colloquiums are still in the works, but there are several potential options that students should find interesting.

On the blog, you can expect the author to address current affairs in archaeology, feature content on other IUP students, and expound on some of their own interests. With any luck, we will be able to track down the elusive second-year students, ever entangled in the arduous task of thesis writing, and we will carefully extract information on the research they have been conducting. In addition to these graduate student spotlights, there is word that some of IUP’s alumni will be open to sharing what they have been up to post-graduation. Graduates of our Applied Archaeology program are everywhere in this field, so there is not telling what we will find. That being said, I look forward to yet another enriching semester in Indiana and hope the students and other readers of the blog find something of value here.