What's New & Happening with

TAS??

Next Speaker Lecture on March 2, 2026

Kit Carson Board Room at 7:00pm

Shelby Jones Phd.

Office of Archaeological Studies

Archaeomagnetic Lab

Shelby manages the ongoing projects and research aims within the laboratories at OAS, including the Archaeomagnetic Lab, the Low Energy Plasma Radiocarbon Sampling Lab, and the Analytic Labs (Supercritical Fluid, Raman Spectroscopy, and pXRF). She earned her PhD from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UCSD in 2022 with her dissertation Archaeomagnetism and its applications in the Broader American Southwest. The data and samples that contributed to her PhD are housed in the Archaeomagnetic Lab at OAS and represent nearly a complete repository for North American archaeodirectional samples from 1964 to present. One of her responsibilities as Laboratory Manager at OAS is to organize, digitize, and conduct ongoing research using the nearly 51,000 archaeomagnetic samples and their associated magnetic data archived in the facility. She also works closely with the OAS volunteers and assists the Instructional Coordinator with educational programming, as needed.

When she is isn’t at OAS, Shelby spends her time in her garden, completing untold number of house repairs, and rehabilitating street cats for adoption.

Title: Archaeomagnetism in the United States Southwest, where are we now?

Abstract

Beginning in 1964, an academic lineage of Robert DuBois and his students, Daniel Wolfman and Jeffrey Eighmy, developed dedicated United States-based archaeomagnetic research programs. Collectively, they analyzed samples from roughly 5,400 proveniences, primarily from North America. Yet, despite their decades of effort, few journal publications reporting these results either as localized or as part of larger analyses resulted. Most of their published results are in archaeological reports and often lack the supporting technical data, thereby limiting data accessibility and reuseability. In 2015, Jones initiated a salvage archival project to digitize all surviving data and metadata from the three aforementioned scientists' estates and emeritus collections. The result of this project is a collation of the majority of US-based archaeomagnetic data and basic archaeological metadata into a searchable database able to be filtered by latitude longitude (Jones et al. 2021). But at the time, the smaller datasets from Stacey Lengyel, Robert Sternberg, and others were not fully available. Since then, OAS has now become the repository for the entirety of the archaeomagnetic records for the United States and significant progress has been made in the digitization and organization of the newly accessioned collections. Doing so now permits the opportunity to delve into the physical archives and database to re-evaluate the material available to answer archaeological questions. Stay tuned for continued updates, database and archive upgrades, as well as construction projects in the OAS Archaeomagnetic Laboratory.

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History of Taos Archaeological Society Project

 An effort is currently underway to build a historical timeline of TAS events and history! We need your help!

The Taos Archaeological Society has operated for 34 years. In that time, many documents have been produced. Unfortunately, TAS does not have a complete record of documents produced and distributed.

 We are in need of documents/publications that date from September 1999 through February 2014. 

 You can help by contributing:

Past bulletins, meeting minutes, financial statements, member lists, and other communications. 

Thank you for your continued support of the Taos Archaeological Society.

Contact admin@Taosarch.org