User:Carefulcreature/Lynne Sebastian

Biography
Dr. Lynne Sebastian is an American archaeologist and former president of The Society for American Archaeology best known for the preservation of southwestern US archaeology. To this day, Dr. Sebastian remains a leader in cultural resource management and claims herself as “happily retired” after over 30 years of historical preservation in archaeological work. As of April 2018, Sebastian lives in Rio Rancho, New Mexico with her husband.

In 1969, Sebastian received her BA in English and Secondary Language at University of Michigan, discouraged from pursuing archaeology at the time by her mother, being told she would “never get a job” in the field. Nonetheless, Sebastian found her English and Secondary Language degree did not get her any further, ending up working as a secretary at University of Michigan afterwards. Furthering her interest and experience in archaeological work, Sebastian later found herself in an editing job at the University of Michigan’s Museum of Anthropology for a few years before moving to Utah with her husband at the time for military reasons.

In 1977, Dr. Sebastian continued her education and earned her MA in English Literature at the University of Utah. From here, she was asked by Dr. Jeremy Sabloff, a professor at the time, to be his copy editor for American Antiquity, a peer-reviewed academic journal. This ultimately led to Dr. Sebastian meeting the late Jesse Jennings (1909-1997), who assigned her as his manuscript editor by both past and current students on the excavations of dry caves and shelters in Utah, not taking “no” for an answer, which Sebastian says Jennings would always deny having done so. Similarly, Sebastian’s manuscript editing introduced her to a new world of archaeology she had not considered before, driving her to pursue archaeology while at the University of Utah. Despite Jesse Jennings’ discouraging proclamations of her being “a bored housewife,” Sebastian continued forth and completed all courses with high grades, in which she continued forward into field school and gained the unshakable support of Jennings.

In 1988, Lynne Sebastian received her PhD in Anthropology at the University of New Mexico, where she stated how she “barely survived” field school, as stated during her Society of American Anthropology Interview in 2017. To this day, Sebastian remains semi-retired in this field, though she is still active in archaeological organizations to this day as a pioneer in

Contributions to the Archaeology of Southwestern United States
Dr. Sebastian’s career as a southwestern archaeologist spans more than four decades, and she is a recognized expert in historic preservation of the Southwestern region of the United States. Her initial field training took place in 1978 at the University of Utah Archaeological Field School, where she participated in excavations at a large Fremont village in central Utah. Following this, she served as a crew chief during the 1979-1980 Dolores Archaeological Project in southwestern Colorado where she was in charge of excavations of a Pueblo I hamlet, which included a 21-room roomblock, two large pitstructures, and midden deposits at the site. As a graduate student, she was a Teaching Assistant during the 1981 University of New Mexico Archaeological Field School, which involved salvage excavations at LA 282, “a large, badly vandalized Pueblo IV Piro site near Socorro, New Mexico.”