Bonnie L Pitblado
Biographic Data
| ID | 296123 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Bonnie L Pitblado |
| GIVEN NAMES | Bonnie L |
| FAMILY NAME | Pitblado |
| SIGNATURE | PITBLADO B L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oklahoma |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0250-2998 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 154 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 22 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Retheorizing Archaeological “Artefacts” as “Belongings
In this article, we suggest that archaeologists should recognise the limitations of the term “artefact”, because it does not capture the many ways that diverse groups think about and interact with such objects. There are two important reasons for doing this. First, as we show through numerous examples, archaeologists’ conception of portable material objects as “artefacts” is narrow and unlikely to align with the conceptions by the people who left…
The Earliest Peopling of the Rocky and Andes Mountains
The American Cordillera comprises a system of mountains stretching nearly 15,000 kilometres from the Alaska and Brooks Ranges in the north to the southernmost tip of South America at Tierra del Fuego. In a rather real way, the Cordillera constitutes a backbone for the Western Hemisphere. Within the American Cordillera, the North American Rocky Mountains and South American Andes contain some of the earliest widely accepted sites in the hemisphere …
Conference ReviewHobby Archaeology — From Citizen Science to Heritage Practice Communities
The Oklahoma Public Archaeology Network (Okpan)
As the venues for professional training and education, universities have always shaped the future of the archaeological discipline—for better but also, in important ways, for worse. Historically, university structures promoted practitioner homogeneity and social inequity and, at the largest research-intensive universities, even managed to turn “service” into a dirty word. However, using the same structures that perpetuated damaging practices in t…
Professional–Collector Collaboration
This introductory article foregrounds the articles in this special issue, “Professional–Collector Collaboration: Global Challenges and Solutions,” complementing the special issue “Professional–Collector Collaboration Moving beyond Debate to Best Practice,” also published in Advances in Archaeological Practice . The articles that we introduce here cover examples and case studies from European settings such as Norway, the Czech Republic, England, W…
Professional–Collector Collaboration
This article introduces the first of what will ultimately be two collections of case studies in archaeologist–responsible/responsive artifact collector collaboration. Focused on the United States, the articles in this issue of Advances in Archaeological Practice share the thoughts and experiences of archaeologists representing diverse employment sectors (compliance, agency, museum, and university), artifact collectors, and members of descendant c…
On Rehumanizing Pleistocene People of the Western Hemisphere
Since the emergence of the niche in Folsom, New Mexico, in the late 1920s, peopling archaeology has sought to understand the earliest human occupants of the Western Hemisphere. Three generations of practitioners have made great strides in the techno-environmental arena. However, we have largely failed to tap into PaleoIndigenous intellectual, emotional, and social lives-the very domains that made Ice Age people as fully human as we are. As a resu…
Unravelling the spectra of stewards and collectors
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The dangers of conflating responsible and responsive artefact stewardship with illicit and illegal collecting
Archaeology and private artefact collecting have complex and inextricably linked histories. Archaeologists have long drawn attention to criminal activity among collectors, but to assume that all private owners of cultural material-and any archaeologists who interact with them-have ill-intent or engage in illegal behaviour can cause as much harm to the archaeological record as the criminal actions themselves
Fladmark + 40
Forty years ago, Knut Fladmark (1979) argued that the Pacific Coast offered a viable alternative to the ice-free corridor model for the initial peopling of the Americas-one of the first to support a 'coastal migration theory' that remained marginal for decades. Today, the pre-Clovis occupation at the Monte Verde site is widely accepted, several other pre-Clovis sites are well documented, investigations of terminal Pleistocene subaerial and submer…
The role of the Rocky Mountains in the peopling of North America
The peopling of high-altitude landscapes of the Americas
Discriminating Quartzite Sources Petrographically in the Upper Gunnison Basin, Colorado
Archaeologists lack a protocol for systematically attributing quartzite artifacts to particular geologic sources of the material. This paper, in an effort to begin to remedy that situation, reports the preliminary results of a petrographic study of quartzite samples from the Upper Gunnison Basin (UGB), Colorado. In that region, the overwhelming predominance of quartzite (often > 90 per cent) at most archaeological sites has hampered efforts to as…
Clovis Caches
I really like the edited volume Clovis Caches, and I am certain that anyone with an interest in hunter-gatherer lithic technology or Paleoindian archaeology will be happy to have a copy on the shel
Paleoindian archaeology of the Upper Gunnison Basin, Colorado Rocky Mountains
The past two decades have seen a fluorescence of work at Paleoindian sites in Colorado’s Upper Gunnison Basin (UGB). This article presents and synthesizes the results of that work in two parts, the first, a landscape-scale analysis of 82 UGB Paleoindian components as reported in Colorado state site files; the second, a higher-resolution analysis of Paleoindian sites excavated in recent years. Conclusions include that starting as early as Folsom t…
How Archaeologists and Artifact Collectors Can—and Should—Collaborate to Comply with Legal and Ethical Antiquities Codes
In a recent American Antiquity forum (Pitblado 2014), I argued that not only is it possible for archaeologists to engage in ethical collaborations with members of the artifact-collecting public, but that the Society for American Archaeology’s “Principles of Archaeological Ethics” stipulates that we should do so. This is not a message, however, that has fully permeated the archaeological community, which has led to a schism between populations who…
An Argument for Ethical, Proactive, Archaeologist-Artifact Collector Collaboration
This essay addresses the contentious issue of collaboration between archaeologists and artifact collectors. I argue that in many instances, alienating members of the collecting public is not just bad practice; such alienation itself also violates the Society for American Archaeology's (SAA's) Principles of Archaeological Ethics. I make my case by first exploring the SAA's ethical code. I focus initially on 'stewardship' and 'commercialization,' w…
Archaeological Fingerprinting and Fremont Figurines
After the anonymous 2011 return of a long-missing Pilling Fremont figurine, a multi-disciplinary research team conducted “fingerprint” analyses in an effort to match it to 10 mates with intact provenance. The Pilling figurines, crafted 1,000 years ago and cached in a remote sandstone niche in eastern Utah, are the most significant find of Fremont portable art ever documented because they occurred in situ and are unparalleled in detail and complet…
LA-ICP-MS analysis of quartzite from the Upper Gunnison Basin, Colorado
A Tale of Two Migrations
Pilot study experiments sourcing quartzite, Gunnison Basin, Colorado
This paper reports the results of pilot‐study efforts to develop methods to profile quartzite, a rock type to which geochemical and other sourcing techniques have only rarely been applied. The long‐term goal of the research is to fingerprint sources of quartzite in the Gunnison Basin, southwest Colorado, used by Paleoindian people ca. 11,500–8,000 years ago to make stone tools. Success would facilitate reconstruction of Paleoindian mobility in th…
Peak to Peak in Paleoindian Time
One-hundred and sixty-six Paleoindian projectile points from suiface contexts in southwest Colorado are documented, analyzed, and evaluated in terms of existing models of Paleoindian adaptation to the Rocky Mountain environment. The southwestern Colorado projectile points—morphologically and in terms of raw material use—appear to share much in common with mountain traditions defined for other Rocky Mountain regions, and there is some basis for pu…
Fladmark + 40
Forty years ago, Knut Fladmark (1979) argued that the Pacific Coast offered a viable alternative to the ice-free corridor model for the initial peopling of the Americas-one of the first to support a 'coastal migration theory' that remained marginal for decades. Today, the pre-Clovis occupation at the Monte Verde site is widely accepted, several other pre-Clovis sites are well documented, investigations of terminal Pleistocene subaerial and submer…
A Tale of Two Migrations
Pilot study experiments sourcing quartzite, Gunnison Basin, Colorado
This paper reports the results of pilot‐study efforts to develop methods to profile quartzite, a rock type to which geochemical and other sourcing techniques have only rarely been applied. The long‐term goal of the research is to fingerprint sources of quartzite in the Gunnison Basin, southwest Colorado, used by Paleoindian people ca. 11,500–8,000 years ago to make stone tools. Success would facilitate reconstruction of Paleoindian mobility in th…
Discriminating Quartzite Sources Petrographically in the Upper Gunnison Basin, Colorado
Archaeologists lack a protocol for systematically attributing quartzite artifacts to particular geologic sources of the material. This paper, in an effort to begin to remedy that situation, reports the preliminary results of a petrographic study of quartzite samples from the Upper Gunnison Basin (UGB), Colorado. In that region, the overwhelming predominance of quartzite (often > 90 per cent) at most archaeological sites has hampered efforts to as…
LA-ICP-MS analysis of quartzite from the Upper Gunnison Basin, Colorado
Peak to Peak in Paleoindian Time
One-hundred and sixty-six Paleoindian projectile points from suiface contexts in southwest Colorado are documented, analyzed, and evaluated in terms of existing models of Paleoindian adaptation to the Rocky Mountain environment. The southwestern Colorado projectile points—morphologically and in terms of raw material use—appear to share much in common with mountain traditions defined for other Rocky Mountain regions, and there is some basis for pu…
An Argument for Ethical, Proactive, Archaeologist-Artifact Collector Collaboration
This essay addresses the contentious issue of collaboration between archaeologists and artifact collectors. I argue that in many instances, alienating members of the collecting public is not just bad practice; such alienation itself also violates the Society for American Archaeology's (SAA's) Principles of Archaeological Ethics. I make my case by first exploring the SAA's ethical code. I focus initially on 'stewardship' and 'commercialization,' w…
On Rehumanizing Pleistocene People of the Western Hemisphere
Since the emergence of the niche in Folsom, New Mexico, in the late 1920s, peopling archaeology has sought to understand the earliest human occupants of the Western Hemisphere. Three generations of practitioners have made great strides in the techno-environmental arena. However, we have largely failed to tap into PaleoIndigenous intellectual, emotional, and social lives-the very domains that made Ice Age people as fully human as we are. As a resu…
The dangers of conflating responsible and responsive artefact stewardship with illicit and illegal collecting
Archaeology and private artefact collecting have complex and inextricably linked histories. Archaeologists have long drawn attention to criminal activity among collectors, but to assume that all private owners of cultural material-and any archaeologists who interact with them-have ill-intent or engage in illegal behaviour can cause as much harm to the archaeological record as the criminal actions themselves
How Archaeologists and Artifact Collectors Can—and Should—Collaborate to Comply with Legal and Ethical Antiquities Codes
In a recent American Antiquity forum (Pitblado 2014), I argued that not only is it possible for archaeologists to engage in ethical collaborations with members of the artifact-collecting public, but that the Society for American Archaeology’s “Principles of Archaeological Ethics” stipulates that we should do so. This is not a message, however, that has fully permeated the archaeological community, which has led to a schism between populations who…
Professional–Collector Collaboration
This article introduces the first of what will ultimately be two collections of case studies in archaeologist–responsible/responsive artifact collector collaboration. Focused on the United States, the articles in this issue of Advances in Archaeological Practice share the thoughts and experiences of archaeologists representing diverse employment sectors (compliance, agency, museum, and university), artifact collectors, and members of descendant c…
The Oklahoma Public Archaeology Network (Okpan)
As the venues for professional training and education, universities have always shaped the future of the archaeological discipline—for better but also, in important ways, for worse. Historically, university structures promoted practitioner homogeneity and social inequity and, at the largest research-intensive universities, even managed to turn “service” into a dirty word. However, using the same structures that perpetuated damaging practices in t…
Unravelling the spectra of stewards and collectors
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Retheorizing Archaeological “Artefacts” as “Belongings
In this article, we suggest that archaeologists should recognise the limitations of the term “artefact”, because it does not capture the many ways that diverse groups think about and interact with such objects. There are two important reasons for doing this. First, as we show through numerous examples, archaeologists’ conception of portable material objects as “artefacts” is narrow and unlikely to align with the conceptions by the people who left…
Professional–Collector Collaboration
This introductory article foregrounds the articles in this special issue, “Professional–Collector Collaboration: Global Challenges and Solutions,” complementing the special issue “Professional–Collector Collaboration Moving beyond Debate to Best Practice,” also published in Advances in Archaeological Practice . The articles that we introduce here cover examples and case studies from European settings such as Norway, the Czech Republic, England, W…
Clovis Caches
I really like the edited volume Clovis Caches, and I am certain that anyone with an interest in hunter-gatherer lithic technology or Paleoindian archaeology will be happy to have a copy on the shel
Archaeological Fingerprinting and Fremont Figurines
After the anonymous 2011 return of a long-missing Pilling Fremont figurine, a multi-disciplinary research team conducted “fingerprint” analyses in an effort to match it to 10 mates with intact provenance. The Pilling figurines, crafted 1,000 years ago and cached in a remote sandstone niche in eastern Utah, are the most significant find of Fremont portable art ever documented because they occurred in situ and are unparalleled in detail and complet…
Peak to Peak in Paleoindian Time
One-hundred and sixty-six Paleoindian projectile points from suiface contexts in southwest Colorado are documented, analyzed, and evaluated in terms of existing models of Paleoindian adaptation to the Rocky Mountain environment. The southwestern Colorado projectile points—morphologically and in terms of raw material use—appear to share much in common with mountain traditions defined for other Rocky Mountain regions, and there is some basis for pu…
Pilot study experiments sourcing quartzite, Gunnison Basin, Colorado
This paper reports the results of pilot‐study efforts to develop methods to profile quartzite, a rock type to which geochemical and other sourcing techniques have only rarely been applied. The long‐term goal of the research is to fingerprint sources of quartzite in the Gunnison Basin, southwest Colorado, used by Paleoindian people ca. 11,500–8,000 years ago to make stone tools. Success would facilitate reconstruction of Paleoindian mobility in th…
A Tale of Two Migrations
LA-ICP-MS analysis of quartzite from the Upper Gunnison Basin, Colorado
Archaeological Fingerprinting and Fremont Figurines
After the anonymous 2011 return of a long-missing Pilling Fremont figurine, a multi-disciplinary research team conducted “fingerprint” analyses in an effort to match it to 10 mates with intact provenance. The Pilling figurines, crafted 1,000 years ago and cached in a remote sandstone niche in eastern Utah, are the most significant find of Fremont portable art ever documented because they occurred in situ and are unparalleled in detail and complet…
How Archaeologists and Artifact Collectors Can—and Should—Collaborate to Comply with Legal and Ethical Antiquities Codes
In a recent American Antiquity forum (Pitblado 2014), I argued that not only is it possible for archaeologists to engage in ethical collaborations with members of the artifact-collecting public, but that the Society for American Archaeology’s “Principles of Archaeological Ethics” stipulates that we should do so. This is not a message, however, that has fully permeated the archaeological community, which has led to a schism between populations who…
An Argument for Ethical, Proactive, Archaeologist-Artifact Collector Collaboration
This essay addresses the contentious issue of collaboration between archaeologists and artifact collectors. I argue that in many instances, alienating members of the collecting public is not just bad practice; such alienation itself also violates the Society for American Archaeology's (SAA's) Principles of Archaeological Ethics. I make my case by first exploring the SAA's ethical code. I focus initially on 'stewardship' and 'commercialization,' w…
Paleoindian archaeology of the Upper Gunnison Basin, Colorado Rocky Mountains
The past two decades have seen a fluorescence of work at Paleoindian sites in Colorado’s Upper Gunnison Basin (UGB). This article presents and synthesizes the results of that work in two parts, the first, a landscape-scale analysis of 82 UGB Paleoindian components as reported in Colorado state site files; the second, a higher-resolution analysis of Paleoindian sites excavated in recent years. Conclusions include that starting as early as Folsom t…
Discriminating Quartzite Sources Petrographically in the Upper Gunnison Basin, Colorado
Archaeologists lack a protocol for systematically attributing quartzite artifacts to particular geologic sources of the material. This paper, in an effort to begin to remedy that situation, reports the preliminary results of a petrographic study of quartzite samples from the Upper Gunnison Basin (UGB), Colorado. In that region, the overwhelming predominance of quartzite (often > 90 per cent) at most archaeological sites has hampered efforts to as…
Clovis Caches
I really like the edited volume Clovis Caches, and I am certain that anyone with an interest in hunter-gatherer lithic technology or Paleoindian archaeology will be happy to have a copy on the shel
The role of the Rocky Mountains in the peopling of North America
The peopling of high-altitude landscapes of the Americas
Unravelling the spectra of stewards and collectors
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The dangers of conflating responsible and responsive artefact stewardship with illicit and illegal collecting
Archaeology and private artefact collecting have complex and inextricably linked histories. Archaeologists have long drawn attention to criminal activity among collectors, but to assume that all private owners of cultural material-and any archaeologists who interact with them-have ill-intent or engage in illegal behaviour can cause as much harm to the archaeological record as the criminal actions themselves
Fladmark + 40
Forty years ago, Knut Fladmark (1979) argued that the Pacific Coast offered a viable alternative to the ice-free corridor model for the initial peopling of the Americas-one of the first to support a 'coastal migration theory' that remained marginal for decades. Today, the pre-Clovis occupation at the Monte Verde site is widely accepted, several other pre-Clovis sites are well documented, investigations of terminal Pleistocene subaerial and submer…
Professional–Collector Collaboration
This introductory article foregrounds the articles in this special issue, “Professional–Collector Collaboration: Global Challenges and Solutions,” complementing the special issue “Professional–Collector Collaboration Moving beyond Debate to Best Practice,” also published in Advances in Archaeological Practice . The articles that we introduce here cover examples and case studies from European settings such as Norway, the Czech Republic, England, W…
Professional–Collector Collaboration
This article introduces the first of what will ultimately be two collections of case studies in archaeologist–responsible/responsive artifact collector collaboration. Focused on the United States, the articles in this issue of Advances in Archaeological Practice share the thoughts and experiences of archaeologists representing diverse employment sectors (compliance, agency, museum, and university), artifact collectors, and members of descendant c…
On Rehumanizing Pleistocene People of the Western Hemisphere
Since the emergence of the niche in Folsom, New Mexico, in the late 1920s, peopling archaeology has sought to understand the earliest human occupants of the Western Hemisphere. Three generations of practitioners have made great strides in the techno-environmental arena. However, we have largely failed to tap into PaleoIndigenous intellectual, emotional, and social lives-the very domains that made Ice Age people as fully human as we are. As a resu…
The Oklahoma Public Archaeology Network (Okpan)
As the venues for professional training and education, universities have always shaped the future of the archaeological discipline—for better but also, in important ways, for worse. Historically, university structures promoted practitioner homogeneity and social inequity and, at the largest research-intensive universities, even managed to turn “service” into a dirty word. However, using the same structures that perpetuated damaging practices in t…
The Earliest Peopling of the Rocky and Andes Mountains
The American Cordillera comprises a system of mountains stretching nearly 15,000 kilometres from the Alaska and Brooks Ranges in the north to the southernmost tip of South America at Tierra del Fuego. In a rather real way, the Cordillera constitutes a backbone for the Western Hemisphere. Within the American Cordillera, the North American Rocky Mountains and South American Andes contain some of the earliest widely accepted sites in the hemisphere …
Conference ReviewHobby Archaeology — From Citizen Science to Heritage Practice Communities
Retheorizing Archaeological “Artefacts” as “Belongings
In this article, we suggest that archaeologists should recognise the limitations of the term “artefact”, because it does not capture the many ways that diverse groups think about and interact with such objects. There are two important reasons for doing this. First, as we show through numerous examples, archaeologists’ conception of portable material objects as “artefacts” is narrow and unlikely to align with the conceptions by the people who left…
Archaeology (20 works) · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies (14 works) · Geography (13 works) · History (13 works) · Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology (11 works) · Geology (10 works) · History (9 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Archaeological Research and Protection (6 works) · Paleontology (6 works)