The web site for NWAC 2010, to be hosted at Central Washington University March 24 – 27, 2010 in Ellensburg, Washington, is up and running. NWAC is a great conference which we were lucky to host in Victoria a couple of years ago. In case you are wondering where Ellensburg is (no offence), it’s just to the east of the Cascades from Seattle, north of Yakima, about a 350 km drive from Victoria: map.
The theme of this year’s conference is the very welcome “At a Crossroads”:
Anthropology at the Crossroads” is the theme for the Northwest Anthropology Conference (NWAC), Ellensburg, Washington, March 24 – 27, 2010. While all submissions will be considered, this conference will offer opportunities for multiple perspectives on where we are as a discipline, society, and species, with a special emphasis on people and the environment. The “Anthropology at the Crossroads” conference will include symposia and presentations on subjects from archaeology, cultural and linguistic anthropology, paleoanthropology, primatology, medical anthropology, visual anthropology, and others. We invite submitters to use their own preposition in describing their presentation/symposia as “Anthropology at/of/on/etc the Crossroads.” Studying the past, understanding the present, and preparing for the future, makes Anthropology even more relevant today as the discipline continues to assert the importance of an appreciation for culturally diverse modes of interacting with our environment. Thus, this conference is a crossroads where the exchange of ideas better prepares us, our students, and our work to serve the communities we live in as we maintain our commitment to exchanging and transmitting our under-standings of all people, in all places, and at all times. “Anthropology at the Crossroads” also implies interaction among sub-disciplines and communities in an integrated fashion and in this manner encourages self reflection on the relevance of Anthropology today at a moment when we appear to be at several global crossroads.
Northwest Coast Archaeology 
Were procedings of this conferece ever published?
If they are, where would file be available?
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Hi Edgewater,
For the NW Anthropology Conference, there is no routine publication of proceedings and never had been. It’s a small, informal conference that usually costs only about 50$ to attend and there isn’t the infrastructure or $ to have a regular publication come out. Some conference papers end up in the Journal of Northwest Anthropology, which is also a product of the same organization that oversees the conferences.
You can see the table of contents of all issues of that journal and its predecessors here:
http://www.journalnw.org/contents.html
It used to be they would publish the abstracts after the conference in that journal but I am not sure if that practice continues, and in any case it is not likely to be findable on the internet.
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Thanks Q.That helps. Somewhat.
How are these conferences advertised? Are they open to the public? Would those of the public intterested in archaeology get something out of it if they attended?
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Yes, generally speaking they are open to anyone who is able to pay the registration fee. I always feel, as a professional, that I get a lot out of some papers and rather little out of others. Some sessions at conferences are more specialized, and these may be harder to just drop in on. It’s a mixed bag, usually.
There’s no one-stop shopping for these. The NW Anthropology Conference is one big one that is “local” and you can google around for where the next one is, usually March.
The BC Archaeology Forum is a very low key one-day conference. I am going to post in the next few days that the next one is coming up next month in Squamish. Details here:
Click to access bc-arch-forum.pdf
There’s also the Canadian Archaeological Association conference, but it moves around the country a lot. Annually there is Chacmool Conference in Calgary. UBC holds “Archaeology Day” most years. When the conference is local and I am on the ball, I often make a post about it to bring it to the reader’s attention, especially since these are often indifferently advertised.
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