Our next regular meeting will be Tuesday, May 19th, 2026.  
Casa Chapala, 9041 Research Blvd. #100 (Hwy 183 and Burnet Rd.)

The April speaker will be

Marybeth Tomka 

Argyle Archaeological Services

presenting  

Nationwide Collections Locator Project: Did we flop at the SAAs?

The talk deals with a project stemming from Marybeth's involvement with the Society for American Archaeology's Airlie House 2.0 (AH2.0) Task Force and the Archaeological Collections and Repositories Community of Practice (ARC-CoP) initiatives to locate and publish information on archaeological collections for the benefits of researchers and descendant communities.

Marybeth Tomka holds a B.A. and M.A. in Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin and a Professional Specialization Certification in Collections Management from the University of Victoria. She has been doing archaeological work for 45 years having worked in New Mexico and Texas, doing ceramic and lithic analysis, teaching field schools while at UTSA, and spending the majority of her time honing her skills in collections management as an archaeological curator at Texas Parks and Wildlife, lab director at TRC Mariah, Lab Director and Curator at UTSA, and Head of Collections at TARL. She retired in 2022 and started Argyle Archaeological Services LLC in March 2023. Since then, she has consulted with a private collector, facilitated an Ethical Native American Repatriation, subcontracted on lithic and ceramic analyses projects, and is working on the analysis and reporting for a small historical excavation project on the middle Texas coast. She is an active member of the Council of Texas Archeologists, a past treasurer of the TAS, and a past officer of the TCAS. Marybeth currently serves as a member of the AH 2.0 Collections Team, the Archaeological Collections Consortium (ACC), and the treasurer of the Friends group of the Association for Archaeological Collections and Repositories (AACR), the fundraising arm of the ACR-CoP.

Photos provided by Marybeth Tomka, "Both pictures are from 1981.  One is from New Mexico during my field school with Harry Shafer at NAN Ranch and the other is at  41WH39, The Crestmont Site (or what we called the Wharton site before it had a name).  It was my first field experience and it was a salvage operation that started in January 1981 when a Ditch Witch digging a telephone line in a housing development hit skeletal material. The grad students at TARL knew I was itching to get experience and had just taken osteology so they took me along to check out the site and meet Paddy Patterson from THC there the next morning -- Saturday.  At the crack of dawn, Jeff Girard, Rick Watson, and I headed off to Wharton, Texas.  My God what an experience.  This picture is from summer work when I got back from field school."

Wondering what our programs are like? View the list of speakers and topics we've had since 2006. Or watch a few of our pandemic-era programs on our YouTube channel.