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Arizona State Museum appoints Patrick D. Lyons as new director

The Arizona State Museum (ASM) has named Patrick D. Lyons, Ph.D. as its new director. Lyons, an archaeologist, is ASM’s seventh director since its founding by the territorial legislature in 1893.

Lyons replaces Dr. Beth Grindell who was named director following the death of Hartman H. Lomawaima in 2008, pending a national search. Lyons will assume the directorship on June 1, 2013.

Lyons has been serving as head of collections at Arizona State Museum since 2006 and as associate director since 2009. Previous to his work at the museum, Lyons was a preservation archaeologist at Archaeology Southwest (previously known as Center for Desert Archaeology) in Tucson. Lyons is best known for his fieldwork and research on the Salado phenomenon in the San Pedro River Valley in southeastern Arizona, and for his research on the collections housed at Arizona State Museum. Among his long list of publications, Lyons is co-editor and contributing author of Migrants and Mounds: Classic Period Archaeology of the Lower San Pedro Valley (Archaeology Southwest, 2012), a magnum opus which synthesizes the results of fieldwork and related analyses on the Salado archaeological pattern.

Established by the territorial legislature in 1893, Arizona State Museum is the oldest and largest anthropology museum in the region, focusing on the indigenous cultures of Arizona, the American Southwest, and northern Mexico. http://statemuseum.arizona.edu

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