We are happy to announce the award recipients for the Department of Anthropology Archaeology Fellowships. Ph.D. student Emily Milton received funding from the William A. Lovis Research Fund in Environmental Archaeology, the Lynne Goldstein Fellowship, and the Alumni and Friends Expendable Fund for Archaeology; and Ph.D. student Jeff Burnett received funding from the Lynne Goldstein Fellowship.
Each of the funds support archaeology students in the Department of Anthropology at MSU: for the Alumni and Friends Expendable Fund for Archaeology, the fund is intended to encourage archaeology students who have demonstrated the capacity to achieve educational and professional goals, the motivation to achieve these goals and the initiative to seek opportunities to further their progress. The fund is open to undergraduate and graduate students studying archaeology, and can be used for scholarships for fieldwork, fellowships, research, and travel.
The Lynne Goldstein Fellowship is awarded to graduate students enrolled in the MSU Anthropology Department with preference given to those students who have participated in the Campus Archaeology Program, and is intended to assist students doing their dissertation research.
With the William A. Lovis Research Fund in Environmental Archaeology, the endowment is intended to support interdisciplinary environmental archaeological research bridging anthropological archaeology and the natural, physical, biological and earth sciences. It is designed to underwrite and enhance the work of graduate students who investigate human/environment interaction for deeper time periods prior to Euro-American colonization episodes worldwide.
Ph.D. student Emily Milton received funding from the William A. Lovis Research Fund in Environmental Archaeology to support exploratory analyses for a potential new approach for reconstructing Andean and Pacific coastal diets in southern Peru. As part of her dissertation, she will be investigating how isotopic methods can inform on Early Holocene diet in Peru. Her samples will include environmental substrates including water and plants; data from these materials will also inform on anthropogenic change in the present-day environment.
Milton was also awarded the Lynne Goldstein Fellowship to help her to create outreach materials for her research. She plans to use Storywork, an approach centered on visual art and storytelling, to share her findings with one of the communities she has worked with. Department funding will support both translated and interactive booklets, as well as support a new online project she hopes to begin this fall that will communicate her field and lab methods through immersive visual and audio media.
Lastly, Milton was awarded the Alumni and Friends Expendable Fund for Archaeology to complete data collection for her first dissertation manuscript, which is focused on isotopic measures of seasonal change in the south-central Andes of Peru. She hopes her findings will inform best practices of how archaeologists can isotopically study the archaeological materials from Central Andean sites. The award will support 140 isotopic measurements of water and plants that she will collect in her 2022 field seasons.
Ph.D. student Jeff Burnett received funding from the Lynne Goldstein Fellowship, and the funding will be used to support his dissertation project and to prepare him to apply for the Wenner-Gren Engaged Research Grant program, which supports engaged, community-based anthropological projects that work collaboratively with community groups. His dissertation project is an archaeological investigation of African American homeownership, community formation and memory-making in the historic Highlands area in the resort community of Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts. The Lynne Goldstein Fellowship will allow him to organize and host in-person research design meetings with a core group of collaborators.