From the Director

Margaret Conkey

Suddenly, the Fall semester is half way over, the low light in the sky reminds of our place in the subtle rhythm of seasons in California, and the activity level of everyone has shifted from our dispersed summer mode to the concentrated mode of the academic year. Somehow, for those of us who were "in the field" in June, July, and/or August, this special time seems to be already too far in the past, but amazingly, it is time to once again prepare grant proposals, request permits, and select field crews while we are still processing the data and information from 1995. In the summer of 1995, the associates and affiliates of the Archaeological Research Facility were to be found all around the globe: in Hawaii, California, Arizona, Honduras, Guatemala, Bolivia, France, Italy, Bulgaria, Greece, Egypt, Daghestan, Russia, Zimbabwe, the Caribbean - to name just a few locales - with graduate students in such places as Rome, Turkey, Baja, Peru, Virginia, North Dakota, Israel, and elsewhere. We are amazed at the expanding international networks, the increasing globalization of archaeology: international conferences everywhere, the nearly instantaneous communication made possible by electronic mail with our colleagues from Australia to Norway, from South Africa to Japan, and the explosive exchange of information that seems to accentuate the increasing pace of life due to email, faxes, the urgencies of archaeological salvage or changing political contexts within which archaeology must constantly negotiate.

But the funding for archaeology -despite its front page newspaper stories about such things as new painted Ice Age caves and an Inca princess frozen in a glacier - is increasingly problematic. During the past months, we have seen a threat to the basic sciences, such as archaeology, now funded by the National Science Foundation. Funding for graduate student and undergraduate research is even more difficult; the National Endowment for the Humanities has already been forced to eliminate its very new program to fund Ph.D. dissertation research. And while we at the ARF have benefited immeasurably from the funding made available from the Stahl Endowment, for example, all this international travel, the increasingly sophisticated techniques for analysis (such as AMS dating) are themselves increasingly costly. No wonder it was primarily wealthy gentlemen who were the forefathers of archaeology!

And so, with my appointment as the Director of the ARF for a 5 year period beginning July 1, 1995, I hope to begin the process whereby we can generate more funding for our archaeology, for our graduates and undergraduates. One small step will be the new Undergraduate Archaeology Research Fund, which is described in more detail elsewhere in the Newsletter. And I am especially pleased to announce the establishment of a Paleolithic Art Research Fund, which has now received over $2500.00 to go towards various research projects being carried out that will enhance our understanding, interpretation, and presentation of what Ice Age "art" might have been all about.

Should you have a special interest or focus for a fund, we encourage you to contact us and we would like to help initiate and develop the fund. As we are learning, every donation, no matter how modest, can make a difference. While there is an old saying that "the future of archaeology is in the past", there will not be a future for archaeology if we don't take up the challenges of the present!

Other directions that we hope to take in the next few years include the establishment of our own sample preparation laboratory for the AMS dating samples, and the development of the group equipment inventory of the ARF. These things can happen thanks to the generous endowment from the estate of Paul F. Braun. We are also developing closer ties with our sister institution, the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology - in outreach and educational programs and in publications, so far. As well, we are pleased to note the increase of faculty on the Berkeley campus who are interested in or dedicated to archaeology: we welcome several new faculty to the campus (Professor Wilkie in Anthropology and Professor Ingram in Geography ); and we welcome new Faculty Associates from Geology and the Geological Sciences, the Hearst Museum of Anthropology, and Architecture. With all this hybrid vigor, we look forward to an exciting and productive academic year of 1995-96.