COL Howard MacCord Chapter, Archeological Society of Virginia

Stone tools trace Paleolithic Pacific migration into North America A new analysis of stone tools offers strong evidence for the theory that ancient people from the Pacific Rim traveled a coastal route from East Asia during the last ice age to become North America's First Peoples, according to a paper published this week in the journal Science Advances.

After a night full of good food, good conversation, and several well deserved awards, we got to hear the presentation "Archaeological Foundations: Research and a New Direction at James Monroe's Highland" by Sara Bon-Harper, PhD.

Got to see an interesting presentation by Lynn Ramonville called "Burying the Poor: analyzing pauper gravestones and cemeteries" where she talks about who we're buried in pauper graves, how paupers were determined, and how to find information about the people there.

Starting off Saturday at the 2025 ASV Annual Meeting by seeing Kelly Arford-Horne's presentation on "Exploration of BIPOC Resources at Germanna - A Comparison of Subfloor Pits" where many artifacts have been found at Historic Germanna.

I was excited to see this presentation today! This is an expanded presentation of one that was given at one of our chapter meetings by Yvonne French called "Using Geographic Information Systems for Prehistoric and Historic Archaeological Sites" where she uses ArcGIS to map out archeological and historic sites.

Taft Kiser was next with his presentation called "Five Days in July 1862: James F. Gibson on the Men-of-War Galena, Monitor, and Teaser". This was an amazing story and I wish I'd recorded it!

Our Site PI, Adam Parker, did a presentation called "Going Down the River: Volunteer Investigations at a Potential Ferry Shipwreck in the Pamunkey River" where he talked about volunteer divers looking at a possible vessel in the Pamunkey River.