Monthly Meeting

       DOGS, PEOPLE, AND SOCIOENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE IN CENTRAL NEW MEXICO, CE 1300 - 1950

Emily Lena Jones, PhD

7:30 PM, Tuesday, May 19, 2026 

Albuquerque Museum of Art and History 

2000 Mountain Road NW

The Coronado entrada to New Mexico in 1540-1542 CE marked the start of a dramatic socioeconomic transformation of the region, a process sometimes termed the Columbian Exchange. Changing human- animal relationships were a central part of this process, but relationships with companion animals, such as dogs and other canids, often get less attention in Columbian Exchange studies than do sheep and cattle. In this talk, Emily Lena Jones will discuss what the archaeology of people and dogs in New Mexico between 1300 and 1950 tells us about how the human-canid relationship changed during this time and in this place and then explore what those changes might say about dogs and people more broadly.

Emily Lena Jones is Professor of Anthropology and Regents’ Lecturer at the University of New Mexico. An environmental archaeologist and historical biogeographer, her research focus is on the connections between the human-animal relationship and environmental change across time and space. Her scholarship has been supported by awards from the National Science Foundation, Fulbright, and the School for Advanced Research, among others, and has been published in journals including Science, Nature Human Behavior, and the Journal of Human Evolution, as well as in the books In Search of the Broad Spectrum Revolution in Paleolithic Southwest Europe (Springer, 2016) and Questioning Rebound: People and Environmental Change in the Protohistoric and Early Historic Americas (University of Utah Press, 2023).