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MSU doctoral student’s fieldwork follows Baltimore’s disappearing gardens
Baltimore gardeners grow food on city land they can lose at any time. Intan Kumbayoni spent months documenting what happens when the city takes the land back.
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MSU doctoral student spends summer supporting identification work at the DPAA
A summer on Offutt Air Force Base: how one doctoral student joined the effort to bring service members home
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MSU Anthropology team assists Lansing police with investigation of human remains
Lansing police brought in an MSU Anthropology team to assist after human remains believed to be several years old were found in Lansing on Saturday, according to WLNS. The Medical Examiner’s Office is working to identify the remains, and the investigation is ongoing. Dr. Joe Hefner, associate professor of anthropology and a board-certified forensic anthropologist, said formal analysis had not begun when WLNS 6 News spoke with him Monday. He described in general terms what skeletal remains can offer investigators. “We can look at the bones and determine the age, sex, stature and at times population affinity,” Hefner said. “We…
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MSU research finds collection bias does not mask human skeletal variation
Forensic anthropologists build and test their methods using documented skeletal collections: curated sets of human remains where the donor’s age, sex, ancestry and other identifying information are known. But those collections have never been random samples of the population. Historically, they drew from unclaimed bodies, which skewed toward poorer and marginalized communities. Today, most come from voluntary body donation programs, which skew in the opposite direction: older white men donate at the highest rates. The question for the field has been whether that built-in bias distorts the science built on top of it. A new study by Dr. Rhian Dunn…
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Challenging the sacrifice narrative in Maya cave research
When human remains turn up in the caves of central Belize, the default interpretation has often been the same: sacrifice. Dr. Gabriel Wrobel, professor of anthropology at Michigan State University, has spent two decades testing that assumption, and the evidence keeps pointing somewhere more complicated. In a recent guest presentation for Aztlander, Dr. Wrobel makes a broader case before he gets to the caves: that archaeological interpretation too often outpaces the evidence supporting it, and that sensational readings tend to get rewarded with attention. He opens with a well-known cannibalism controversy from the American Southwest, where a widely covered theory…
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GLIS/Anthropology alum receives prestigious Fulbright award
The Fulbright Program has selected seven Michigan State University students as finalists for the 2026–27 academic year, including recent Global and International Studies (GLIS) and Anthropology alum Catelyn Arnold. Arnold graduated in 2026 with both degrees, along with a minor in Korean. During her time at MSU, she studied abroad in South Korea, interned at the local Refugee Development Center, and became passionate about language education, education justice, and cross-cultural exchange. Her Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship will take place in Korea, an interest that began with language study and grew significantly during her junior-year semester abroad. “Living there gave me…
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Professor Emeritus Lovis receives the 2026 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Michigan Historic Preservation Network
Professor and Curator Emeritus Dr. William A Lovis is the 2026 recipient of a Michigan Historic Preservation Network (MHPN) Lifetime Achievement Award “presented to outstanding and deserving individuals who through personal effort and/or involvement in historic preservation have made a significant contribution to the preservation of Michigan’s heritage”. The award recognizes Professor Lovis’ many contributions to the foundational underpinnings of archaeological heritage management and preservation at the national and state levels. Lovis has chaired the Michigan Historic Preservation Advisory Committee, held government affairs offices with the Society for American Archaeology (SAA), Society of Professional Archaeologists and Register of Professional Archaeologists,…
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Anthropology PhD student’s research examines dismemberment through shape analysis to help solve crimes
By Jalen Smith and Louise Henderson When forensic scientists (people who solve crimes using science) find bones that have been cut with a saw, they try to figure out what kind of saw was used. This can help them narrow down the tools and possibly catch the person who did it. To do this, they look at the marks left on the bones with the saw. One important mark is called the kerf floor shape, which is the shape of the bottom of the cut made by the saw. Think of it like the footprint of the saw blade. In the…
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Dr. Stacey Camp Featured on WKAR TVs Curious About Careers
Dr. Stacey Camp was recently featured in WKAR TVs Curious About Careers program – learning how STEM is used in archaeology and exploring how innovative remote sensing techniques like ground penetrating radar can help archaeologists see the unseen and preserve our collective archaeological heritage.
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Associate Professor Joe Hefner published in Forensic Anthropology
Department of Anthropology Associate Professor has published an article in the journal Forensic Anthropology, along with coauthors Dr. Stephen Ousley of the University of Tennessee (posthumously) and Dr. Ron Richardson of Mercyhurst University. The article is titled “MaMD Analytical 1.0: A Computer Program for Macromorphoscopic Trait Analysis” and covers the use of MaMD Analytical software, an analytical software package for forensic anthropologists to use during their routine casework. MaMD Analytical 1.0 replaces older, less robust methods of analysis and provides a greater number of reference groups for analysis. Abstract: We outline the functionalities and application of MaMD Analytical—a new,…