Archaeologists Visit Ancient Native American...
Transcript of Archaeologists Visit Ancient Native American...
Archaeologists Visit Ancient Native American Earthworks
Class stops to observe “The Octagon” preserved at a golf course in Newark, Ohio The Fall 2012 Great Lakes Archaeology class (ANT 2500), taught by Prof. Tamara Bray, visited the Octagon Earthworks (a 2000 year old lunar observatory) in Newark, Ohio, during last weekend of October. The visit was part of a two-day camping and field studies expedition that focused on the many world-renowned Adena, Hopewell and Mississippian period culture sites within easy striking distance of Detroit. The class earlier completed another overnight excursion to archaeological and historic sites in western Ontario.
Students look at Environment and Culture
Mead left; Bennis right; MDCH staffer center Paula Mead and Ashley Bennis (Anthropology undergraduate students) presented “Anthropological Perspectives on Environmental Health and Environmental Justice” for the Michigan Department of Community Health (MDCH) August, 2012. Their Community Engagement class practicum project relates closely to ongoing fieldwork by WSU medical anthropologists (Sherylyn Briller, Andrea Sankar, Mark Luborsky and Todd Meyers) for the MDCH Division of Environmental Health Toxicology and Response Section on bio-monitoring of urban fishing and consumption on the Detroit River and several other local waterways. Kudos to Mead and Bennis on a great job presenting their work to state officials and engaging in a research activity generally only arrived at much later in one’s career! After graduation, Paula (who is a currently a McNair Scholar) will apply to graduate schools with a specialty in medical anthropology; Ashley is applying to law school with a special interest in environmental issues, health and the law.
Math Corp Researchers Complete Fieldwork
Chrisomalis and Graduate Research Assistant Monica Rodriguez In 2012, Dr. Stephen Chrisomalis concluded his multi-year ethnographic investigation of the Math Corps program at WSU. The project, entitled 'Acquiring a mathematical culture at Math Corps,' investigates how middle school and high-school students in Math Corps learn a set of skills and simultaneously a set of values relating to this community of practice. Math Corps has been a fixture at Wayne for 20 years. Its students are drawn from Detroit public and charter schools with a wide range of mathematical ability and enthusiasm initially, but rapidly acquire and share in a set of locally developed forms of talking about and thinking about their experiences in the program. Since 2008, Dr. Chrisomalis' research has helped pinpoint the ways in which participants acquire positive values associated with particular ways of doing mathematics and talking about mathematical reasoning, and also how their moral and social worlds are transformed through these experiences. Because over 80% of Math Corps graduates go on to college, this research helps to contextualize the social system in which these outcomes are achieved. For more information about the Math Corps, see http://www.mathcorps.org.
Medical Anthropology Alum Receives Prestigious Fellowship at U of M
Dr. Nevedal (hat) with her mentor, Prof. Andrea Sankar Recent medical anthropology Ph.D. Andrea Nevedal received a two-year postdoctoral research fellowship with the Advanced Rehabilitation Research Training Program funded by the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research at the University of Michigan Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. She will be using her training in Anthropology, Gerontology and Public Health to assist Denise Tate with a qualitative study on bladder and bowel complications among civilians and veterans with spinal cord injuries funded by the Department of Defense. The postdoctoral program will also involve working on publications and training in the field of disability and rehabilitation research.
Dingell/Harrison Archaeology Summit at the Huron River
Recent Anthropology MA Dan Harrison (left) chats with Congressman Dingell and staffer in August On August 5, 2012, Congressman John Dingell spoke at the dedication of a state historic marker at the site of General William Hull's crossing of the Huron River in July, 1812. As the only surviving portion of the nation's first military road, the site is now on the National Register of Historic Places. The wooden segment (a corduroy road) of "Hull's Trace" was the centerpiece of a Master's project by Dan Harrison, WSU Anthropology graduate student. Following the ceremony, Dingell and field aide Mark Cochran conferred with Harrison on plans to include the site in the River Raisin National Battlefield Park. Later, at a meeting of the Historical Society of Michigan, Harrison accepted the 2012 Restoration and Preservation Award for his work on the project (http://www.hsmichigan.org/2012/09/28/society-‐presents-‐2012-‐state-‐history-‐awards-‐in-‐monroe/)
Historical Archaeologists Find Evidence of Monserrat’s Earliest Inhabitants
Archaeologists collect surface finds; Ryzewski teaches historic preservation to Monserrat school children The summer of 2012 marked the third field season of the Survey and Landscape Archaeology on Montserrat project (SLAM), co-directed by Krysta Ryzewski of Wayne State and John Cherry of Brown University. Over six weeks, the SLAM research team, comprised of the co-directors, three PhD students from Brown and Boston University, two undergraduate students from Wayne State and the University of Leicester (UK), and local participants, conducted archaeological survey and excavations on the Caribbean island. The team focused on mapping and determining the extent of three remote sites, all of which show evidence of long term occupation by multiple Amerindian, European, and Afro-Caribbean inhabitants over the past 1,000 years. The archaeological team had the opportunity to enter the island’s volcanic exclusion zone for the first time, and to conduct emergency surveys of four historic-period sites that have remarkably survived the catastrophic eruptions of the Soufriere Hills volcano, which has destroyed over half of the island since 1995. The most significant discovery of the summer was a large, concentrated lithic (flint) assemblage found at the Upper Blake’s site in the island’s north, at about 300 meters above sea level. Discovered during a systematic pedestrian survey, the assemblage included an extensive toolkit: percussion blade-cores, blades, backed blades and blade-flakes of various sizes, and associated débitage, including flakes, micro-flakes and shatter. The assemblage’s location and concentration suggested the preservation of one or multiple knapping events in the vicinity. The Upper Blake’s finds potentially push back the clock on the earliest known settlement dates of Montserrat by as many as 1,500 years. Prior to 2012, the earliest known site
on Montserrat was Trants, an Early Ceramic (Saladoid) settlement, which radiocarbon dates indicate was inhabited as early as 500 BC (2500BP). The lithics from Upper Blake’s bear no similarity to Early Ceramic-period lithic technology, but instead are comparable with lithic technologies of the earlier Archaic period, located at sites elsewhere in the Caribbean. Based on the techno-typological characteristics of the Upper Blake’s lithics, it is now clear that an Archaic-period population existed on Montserrat before the Saladoid peoples, and as early as 2000 BC (4000 BP). This evidence sheds new light on the colonization processes of the Caribbean and on the archaeological history of Montserrat. For a report on the Upper Blake’s site finds published in Antiquity, see: http://antiquity.ac.uk/projgall/cherry333/ For more images from the SLAM project see: http://proteus.brown.edu/montserratarchaeology/Home and http://www.facebook.com/pages/Archaeology-on-Montserrat/137534903036840 Anthropology Learning Community Expands Operations 2012-2013 For the 2012-2013 year the Anthropology Learning Community (ALC) has joined with the new Anthropology Graduate Student Organization (AGSO) for events. Last year, there was great interest among the graduate and undergraduate students to have more opportunities for all anthropology students to interact. Led by AGSO President and ALC Mentor, Elspeth Grieger the focus this year has been creating opportunities to interact with everyone interested in anthropology at Wayne. One initiative was to co-host a monthly movie night open to the entire university. The film Unmistaken Child was screened in October followed by Moolaadé in November. More screenings and other events are in the works for 2013. The ALC also launched an Anthropology Volunteer Certification on October 26th. The event kicked off with an orientation for new or interested anthropology majors. The second hour of the event introduced and signed up student volunteers in nine on-going projects in archaeology, museum studies, cultural, physical, and medical anthropology with instructions on how to complete an official volunteer certification. Finally, the event closed with a department faculty-student pizza party. The placements begin Winter semester 2013. Several graduate students who attended the AAA in San Francisco this year agreed to talk about the AAA experience in an ALC event entitled “What’s
New at the AAA” on November 26th. The event was oriented towards providing students who were unable to go to the AAA with an opportunity to learn about what they missed and information about current events in the field of anthropology. The Anthropology Graduate Student Organization and the Anthropology Learning Community are excited to continue creating further events in semesters to come. Although this fall has primarily focused on professional development events, you can look forward to more networking and fun events this coming winter Cultural Anthropology Research in Ecuador
Professor Barry Lyons continues ethnographic research in the Ecuadorian Andes
Barry Lyons has been researching and writing about how Ecuadorians understand race and identity for some time now. Here he shares some insights from a recent field work trip, “…in Carnival parades, dance troupes don costumes representing ethnic-‐racial identities. The image shows a group dancing in Guaranda, a provincial capital, on a day during the 2010 Carnival festivities devoted to dance troupes from neighboring indigenous communities. Indian dance troupes commonly display images of what they regard as their own traditional culture. The
dancers' dress here and their bare feet are not as common now in everyday life as they were a couple of generations ago. The two masked dancers at the front represent a bird of the high Andes (curiquingue) and a diablo or "devil"…” Todd Meyers Edits Book on South African Youth
In November, "War in Worcester: Youth and the Apartheid State" (Fordham University Press) was published in the Forms of Living book series edited by Dr. Todd Meyers, Assistant Professor of Medical Anthropology. The book, authored by the preeminent anthropologist of childhood, Pamela Reynolds, is an ethnographic account of young men in South Africa who, starting from a very young age, were involved in
the struggle against apartheid in a small town in the Western Cape. The book offers a keen analysis of the role of youth in armed conflict, from the perspective of the young fighters themselves, as well as delivers a sharp critique of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's insistence on victim-‐hood to characterize the type of political engagement in which these young men were involved.
And finally: Professor Allen Batteau reminisces about his recent research sabbatical. . .
In a Paris Café. . .
Professional high points of the experience included my keynote speech at the First International Conference of Business Anthropology in Guangzhou (China), a meeting with French officials to create a new research institute in the United States, and a meeting with a University of Chicago acquaintance, currently at University College London, who invited me to give a talk there in October. Articles and chapters completed in Paris include “The Poetic Construction of Technology,” “Technology in Business” (for a textbook on Business Anthropology), “The Changing Rhetoric of Corporate Culture” and
I spent my sabbatical writing, talking with colleagues, sampling French wines, listening to lectures, participating in colloquia, exploring cheeses, practicing verb conjugations, and learning the finer points of foie gras on a sabbatical leave in Paris. Invited by colleagues at CETCOPRA (Centre d’Etude des TeChniques des COnnaissances et des PRAtiques) Université Paris 1 – Panthéon Sorbonne), whose work on technology and culture is interwoven with my own, Susan and I arrived in early January and very quickly fell into an intense social and scholarly existence, with no committee meetings, no reports, no election solicitations, and virtually no worries other than what boulevard to stroll down or which boulangerie to visit for baguettes. After only two weeks in Paris, I was invited to be a discussant in a colloquium at Université Paris V, on “Les techniques et la globalisation: échanges, réseaux et espionage industriel au XXe siècle”, to be published next year; and also to present my paper, “‘Sweet Problems’ Network Dynamics, and the Free Flow of Information in a Technological World”, also a future UP V publication.
“The World of Finance” (both for Blackwell’s Companion to Organizational Anthropology), “Horizons of Business Anthropology in a World of Flexible Rationalization” (co-authored by WSU Anthropology alum, Carolyn Psenka, and published in the Journal of Business Anthropology), and substantial work on a chapter, “Business Anthropology Ethics” (co-authors and WSU Anthropology alums Bradley Trainor and Irene Mokra), for Rita Denny’s and Patti Sunderland’s Sourcebook in Business Anthropology.
Social high points of the sabbatical included reconnecting with friends from 40 years ago, and discovering many new friends. After Paris we spent the month of June touring around Normandy and then in the south, visiting vineyards, fromagerie, the Riviera, the Lascaux caves, and the French countryside generally. We are already planning our next trip back.
But this is just a sample!
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