SILVER CITY, Nev. — As part of Nevada’s celebration of Historic Preservation and Archaeological Awareness Month, there are dozens of May events and displays throughout the state. Among them is a display created by archaeologist Robert Elston that illustrates progress on a multi-year archaeological project funded through a National Science Foundation grant.
In 2016 long time Silver City resident Dr. Robert Elston (University of Nevada Reno), Dr. Dave Zeanah (Sacramento State), Dr. Brian Codding (University of Utah), and Dr. Craig Young (Far Western Anthropological Group), received a National Science Foundation grant for a multi-year archaeological project in Grass Valley, Nevada.
A new display at the Post Office in Silver City illustrates progress on their recent research focused on the Late Pleistocene between about 14,000 and 9,000 years ago after people first began to enter interior North America, and began to live here in the Great Basin.
The display can be seen during office hours at the U.S. Post Office in Silver City at 270 Main Street.
For a full list of all the May events across the state, visit the website for Nevada’s State Historic Preservation Office.
About Robert Elston: Dr. Robert Elston’s long career in archaeology includes an enormous list of achievements. In 2004, he was awarded a Fulbright Scholar grant for research at Lanzhou University, Gansu Province, China where he studied climatic variation and human involvement in desertification on the arid margins of the Tengger Desert in Inner Mongolia and Gansu provinces, China.
In 2008 he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
In 2014, he was awarded the Nevada Archaeology Association's Silver Trowel Lifetime Achievement Award. The Silver Trowel Award is presented by NAA to professionals that have spent a majority of their professional career working in Nevada, have made outstanding, positive, and lasting contributions to archaeology in Nevada, and have maintained the highest standards of professionalism and ethics in the conduct of his or her career.
In Nevada, Dr. Elston’s contributions to the prehistory of the Washoe area, excavations at James Creek Shelter, and studies at Whirlwind Valley, Tosawihi, Stillwater Marsh, Railroad Valley, and many other places have “generated critical and ground-breaking data with respect to issues of chronology, prehistoric and ethnohistoric settlement patterns, lithic procurement and conveyance systems, and hunter-gatherer land-use.” He was also a founding member of the Nevada Archaeological Association and served on its board for the first years. During the 2014 Silver Trowell awards ceremony, archaeologist Dr. Mark Giambastiani noted, Dr. Elston’s “work continues to be important to Great Basin prehistory and will provide key components to future research across the region...”
Dr. Elston was also the Research Director for Intermountain Research and an independent archaeological consultant. He was a Visiting Lecturer in the Anthropology Department at the University of California, Davis from 1998 to 2001 and an Adjunct Professor in Anthropology at UNR and at the Desert Research Institute (DRI).
