Voices of the Society for American Archaeology

By K. Kris Hirst, About.com Guide

Listen to Natalia Slobodina.

My name is Natalia Slobodina, and I’m an undergraduate student, I’m a junior at University of Alaska Anchorage, majoring in anthropology, mostly interested in archaeology. This is my first year here, I’ve never been here before. I find the meetings a little bit overwhelming just because of the amount of people. We have our local meetings in Anchorage which is like 400, 500 people, a lot more manageable and you get a chance to talk to a lot more people. But there’s definitely this difference, a diversity of issues that are covered by people from all over the states and it’s nice to get exposure to all of that. We do not deal with as much theory at our local meetings in Alaska, so this has been nice, especially this forum that I just went to about processual archaeology, and a lot of the talks that I went to are about preliminary results of some expeditions. Almost every talk you go to says, you know, this is just preliminary, we’re not saying anything yet. And I know that people are sometimes looking down on those people for saying that, but I think that’s why they came over to the meetings to present and to maybe get some input from their colleagues about these preliminary results. That’s what I think! I’m enjoying it.