September 10, 2026 Monthly Meeting
94 Years of Solitude: New Approaches to Legacy Perishables Analysis
Guest Speaker: Lauren Bussiere
Abstract: Some Texas archaeologists may be familiar with the Rustler Hills sub-region of the eastern Trans-Pecos, where several cave and rock shelter sites produced massive collections of fiber perishables when they were excavated in the 1930s. Unfortunately, these collections have, for the most part, remained unstudied and overlooked, locked away in dark cabinets for most of the last century; some have never been inventoried, much less published. Perishables in general represent an under-examined category of material culture, but one with enormous potential to inform us on ancestral lifeways. In this presentation, I discuss a new study of these phenomenal items, which may re-frame the story of the Rustler Hills inhabitants and their relationships with their Eastern Jornada and Puebloan neighbors, the plant communities they relied on for survival, and the living landscape that was part of their everyday lives. This project is also a case study in how repositories like TARL can shift our approach to collections-based research by involving descendant communities throughout the research process.
Speaker Bio
Lauren Bussiere (RPA, M.A. University of California, San Diego, 2010) is the Head of Collections at the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory (TARL) at The University of Texas at Austin, and a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at UT. She has over 20 years of experience in field and lab archaeology, data management, and repository management, and her research interests include fiber perishables, community-engaged research, ethics in archaeology, and paleoecology. She has worked at TARL in varying capacities since 2015, and has also previously worked as an archaeological laboratory manager in the private sector and as an archaeological curator in private practice; her experience includes work in Texas, California, Mexico, Belize, and Jordan.