If you are an AU Anthropology student in the Calgary area (or surrounding areas), email Dr. Meaghan Peuramaki-Brown (meaghanp@athabascau.ca) and she will add you to our monthly meet up email list.

On Wed. Nov. 16, we met up to attend a lecture of the Archaeological Society of Alberta (ASA)-Calgary Centre, and tonight we met up for a lovely holiday celebration (see photo).

Our goal is to meet once every month to attend some anthropology-oriented event, based on group interest. Our January event will be an ASA talk on Wednesday the 18th. We will meet for supper at 5:30/6pm at the Last Defense Lounge in the MacEwan Student Centre at the University of Calgary Campus, then walk over for the talk at 7:30pm. 

JANUARY 18^th:
Presenter: Dr. Barney Reeves & Dr. Margaret Kennedy
Title: Medicine Wheels and Ceremonial Landscapes: Building on Richard G. Forbis’s Pioneering Contributions
Where: Room 162 Earth Sciences (Tom Oliver Room), University of Calgary
When: 7:30 pm
 Abstract: Dick Forbis, Alberta’s first archaeologist, made many contributions to the archaeology of the Northwestern Plains, particularly in his ten years with the Glenbow Foundation (ca. 1955-1965).  Among these were the recording, mapping and excavation of Alberta medicine wheels. However he, as well as other archaeologists in more recent years, focused on the medicine wheels themselves not the archaeological landscape in which they sit. The study and interpretation of these landscapes and the ceremonial stone feature sites contained therein are, in our opinion, critical to understanding medicine wheels as a whole.
This fundamental principle is illustrated in this talk based on our past four years of study at the Bull’s Forehead and Minor Medicine Wheel Complexes at and above the Forks of the Red Deer and South Saskatchewan rivers. We have found large scale ceremonial complexes, the largest identified to date in the Northern Plains.  These extend for over 10km along and behind the valley edges containing thousands of ceremonial stone features sited and constructed only where the medicine wheels or focal reaches of the rivers are visible.  They were places of pilgrimage, erected over a period of 500-1000 years by ancestral Gros Ventre, prior to their decimation by European diseases in the 1500s.