Annual Meeting

The 2024 Spring Meeting of the MAS will be March 22–24 at the Capital Plaza Hotel in Jefferson City. The meeting will feature a reception, presentations, artifact identification session, silent auction, a dinner banquet with keynote speaker (see below), and a field trip tour of the Missouri State Capital. The MAS meeting is open to the public, more details will be announced soon. View to see details of all activities and print a registration form, or register online.

Reduced room rates of $96 (plus tax) for Society guests include a free hot breakfast. Reserve your room by calling  573-625-1234 and mentioning that you need a room in the Society block, or reserve online at https://reservations.travelclick.com/13414?groupID=4006095

We are pleased to announce that our keynote speaker for the meeting is Dr. Kelly Graf. The keynote presentation will be given after the banquet dinner on March 23. Purchase of a banquet ticket is not required to attend Dr. Graf's presentation.

Dr. Graf will present Siberia, Beringia, and the Peopling of the Americas

Traditionally, peopling of the Americas studies focused on questions of when and from where initial human migration to the Western Hemisphere took place. Researchers have argued for arrival as early as before the last glacial maximum (LGM) to as late as 14,000-13,000 years ago, coinciding with the origins of the Clovis archaeological tradition, and for a founding population from Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, or even Europe with people crossing the Bering Land Bridge, skirting the Pacific coasts, and/or boating across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. New developments in ancient human genomic studies provide a framework for better understanding the tempo and geography of first peoples’ arrival. Documentation of several paleogenomes from late Pleistocene and early Holocene contexts indicate an initial migration from Northeast Asia through Beringia to the Americas. Here, we will explore the archaeological record of northern regions within a paleogenomics context to help fill in gaps in our understanding of the dispersal process to the Americas.