An archeologist researching the Toltec Mounds will start off the 2018-19 UA Little Rock Department of Earth Sciences EARTHtalk! lecture series on Wednesday, Sept. 19. 

The talk, “The First Farmers and Lost Crops of Arkansas,” will begin at 6 p.m. in the Engineering and Information Technology Building auditorium. It is free and open to the public.

Dr. Elizabeth Horton, an archeologist at Toltec Mounds Archeological State Park and research assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Arkansas, studies paleoethnobotany, the study of the relationship between people and plants, with a special interest in the use of plants for technological purposes.

She earned her master’s degree and Ph.D. in anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis, where she studied the 3,000-year-old fabric technologies of basketry and textiles and plant fiber use in the Ozark Plateau of Arkansas and Missouri. After completing a post-doctoral position with the Arkansas Archeological Survey in 2010, she was hired as the station archaeologist for the Arkansas Archeological Survey’s Toltec Mounds Research Station. She continues to research the people-plant interactions of the Native Americans who once lived at Toltec Mounds and runs a publicly accessible research garden.

For more information, contact Michael DeAngelis at 501-569-3542 or mtdeangelis@ualr.edu or visit the UA Little Rock Department of Earth Sciences EARTHtalk! website.