2025 Annual Meeting, May 10, 2025

The 2025 Annual Meeting of the North Dakota Archaeological Association will be Saturday, May 10, 2025, at the North Dakota Heritage Center and State Museum in Bismarck.

After a short business meeting, recipients of the Cynthia Kordecki Scholarship will be announced. The Heritage Center is open 1 PM - 4 PM on Saturday, with ample parking available at the main entrance on the east site of the building. For more information about the Annual Meeting, email ndaainfo@gmail.com.

The meeting and presentations will be available to attend online. A Microsoft Teams invitation will be sent to all members for which we have an email address.

AGENDA

1 PM — Business Meeting

Elections: Vice President and Secretary Treasurer

Cynthia Kordecki Scholarship Recipients

1:45 PM — Break

2 PM — Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAV) in Archaeological Research and Historic Preservation at the SHSND:2014-2024 (and beyond!)

By Tim Reed, State Historical Society of North Dakota

From capturing dramatic oblique aerial imagery to the deployment of advanced sensors to create 3D models, the State Historical Society of North Dakota (SHSND) is recognized as a regional leader in the use of Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAV) in archaeological research and historic preservation projects. This presentation will detail some of the history and technology behind the expansion of the Society’s drone program over a ten-year period. Archaeological research by SHSND staff at multiple North Dakota state historic sites and several preservation projects involving the use of UAV technology will be discussed.

3 PM — Drifting in the Drift Prairie: Big Data, Agent-Based Modeling, and Patterns of Settlement and Abandonment in Central North Dakota

By Dr. Andrew Reinhard, Metcalf Archaeological Consultants, A Terracon Company

Advances in computational complexity have given rise to new ways of interpreting the archaeological record. Complex systems such as climate, landscape, and herd movements contribute to emergent patterns of human settlement and abandonment of sites. Where are the sites archaeologists have yet to find? Predictive modeling in archaeology is not new, and GIS applications often provide clues to locating previously undiscovered cultural resources. One new methodology—archaeological drift—combined with archaeological complexity theory and Big Data maintained at the North Dakota State Historic Preservation Office, might provide more fine-grained models integrating natural phenomena over time with human and animal populations across any given landscape. These phenomena can be assigned variables in a complex algorithm tested in a computational environment (e.g., NetLogo) through agent-based modeling (ABM), the results of which can then be ground-truthed. Can ABM be used to answer questions about trade routes and settlements in North Dakota on a macro scale as well as at the township, range, and section level? This presentation will communicate preliminary results of this research.

4 PM — The Road Not Taken: Reflections on the New Archaeology, 1975-2025

By Paul R. Picha, State Historical Society of North Dakota (retired)

Class notes from 1975 undergraduate coursework “Archaeological Method and Theory”, provide the backdrop to exploring the impacts of the New Archaeology some fifty years on.