OC Events

On the southeast edge of the Okanagan College campus in Penticton, there is an archaeological site. Despite being first excavated in the 1920s and subjected to additional collecting in the ‘50s and ‘60s, materials from this site have yet to be studied and contextualized in detail. This talk will cover some highlights of our recent work on the collection. We will emphasize the local day-to-day facts of life at the site as well as how it was integrated into much larger systems of migration trade and exchange that potentially extended across the BC interior and beyond.

Speaker Bios:
Dr. Flannery Surette is an archaeologist and works in the department of Anthropology at Okanagan College. She specializes in systems of technology including stone tools from the Okanagan Valley, textiles from northern Peru and ostrich eggshell beads from eastern and southern Africa and their relationship to trade and exchange, communities of practice and the creation of social identities.

Dr. Joseph “Jeff” Werner is an archaeologist specializing in Stone Age hunter-gatherers. He works in Western Canada as well as Eastern Africa where he studies the archaeology of the first humans. Jeff experimentally recreates Stone Age technology like ostrich eggshell beads and spears to learn more about their function, how they were made, and what they might have meant to the people who used them.