Audiences are in for a treat as they sit back and listen to a candid discussion about the discipline of archaeology and what it tells us about our own history. Drawing on more than 20 years of experience conducting archaeological research, Hall explains the goals of archaeology and then interactively walks through the process by which archaeological sites are created, taking time to point out the discipline's weaknesses and difficulties archaeologists have interpreting what they find. He then turns the spotlight on archaeology's strengths and discusses what those strengths have allowed us to learn about humans' seven-million-year history that no other discipline can begin to explain.
Christopher T. Hall is a Kentucky native whose fascination with pre-history took him out West at an early age. He began by volunteering on any archaeological project that would take him, but his increasing interest in pre-historic peoples whose survival depended on their ability to hunt animals and gather plants eventually led him to focus on the High Plains and Rocky Mountains of Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado, where Native peoples continued their hunting-gathering lifestyle well after European contact.
Hall is primarily interested in understanding the factors that drive technological change among these societies, and his case study for this endeavor is the first appearance of bow-and-arrow technology on the High Plains around 100 A.D.
Hall holds a B.A. and M.A. in anthropology from the University of Louisville and the University of Wyoming, respectively. He has also completed coursework for a Ph.D., A.B.D., and taught lower and upper-levels of anthropology courses at Washington State University. Having previously worked as a staff archaeologist for Cultural Resources Analysts, Inc., Hall now works as a non-partisan analyst for Kentucky government, but is still actively involved in archaeology and will be participating in the excavation of a 13,000-year-old Mammoth kill site in Wyoming this summer.