Last month Bears Ears Partnership (BEP) staff attended the annual Pecos Conference -- the first and foremost archaeological conference in the American Southwest -- which was held this year on US Forest Service lands just north of Flagstaff, AZ. Kudos and gratitude to the Pecos Conference officers, the Museum of Northern Arizona, and their partners for another great Pecos Conference near Flagstaff!
BEP's participation included staffing a table in the vendors tent, where we informed folks about our Visit With Respect program, our education and advocacy efforts in southeast Utah, and the numerous opportunities to volunteer with us. In addition, BEP's still-new Policy Director (Carleton Bowekaty) made an oral presentation related to the Lands Between (TLB), one of a handful of important presentations about TLB this year.
Finally, BEP put forth a proposal to bring the Pecos Conference back to southeast Utah in 2025. That idea was well received at the conference's business meeting, and a number of folks offered support and assistance. The Pecos Conference has more-or-less regular locations in the other three Four Corners states (i.e., CO, NM and AZ) on a rotating five-year calendar, and we think it would be awesome to have southeast Utah included in that regular rotation.
As you all know, the 100th Anniversary of the Pecos Conference is coming up in 2027, near Pecos NM. The spatial and chronological classification system that came out of that first Pecos Conference, organized and hosted by A.V. Kidder at his excavations at Pecos Pueblo in 1927, has withstood the test of time. The Pecos Classification is still the foundation of Southwestern archaeological space-and-time discussion to this day.
-Kenny Wintch, BEP Preservation Archaeologist
