For Anishinaabe families in Michigan, food is far more than what’s on the table. It connects generations, carries language and cultural knowledge, and promotes healing.
That’s what a group of mothers and grandmothers described in a new study published in Public Health Nutrition by the Wiba Anung research team, a long-running partnership between Indigenous community leaders, the Inter-Tribal Council of Michigan and researchers at Michigan State University. Wiba Anung, which translates to “Early Star” in Anishinaabemowin, works with the Inter-Tribal Council of Michigan to support food sovereignty, early childhood education and community well-being for Indigenous children and families across Michigan.
Dr. Heather Howard-Bobiwash, associate professor of anthropology and graduate program director, is a member of the Wiba Anung team and one of 14 co-authors on the study. Her research centers on how food, nourishment and collective memory shape identity, healing and well-being in Indigenous communities.
The study adapted Photovoice, a research method in which participants photograph their own experiences and discuss them together, to follow the principles of Anishinaabe Symbol-Based Reflection, which emphasizes creating and describing photographs as symbols for a holistic experience that engages mental, emotional and spiritual well-being. Six mothers and grandmothers caring for Anishinaabe children under five participated, photographing their everyday lives with food: gardening with their children, harvesting, preparing meals together.
Two themes emerged. The first centered on food as a connector, linking relatives across time and place through the acts of harvesting, preparing and sharing food. The second found that food is foundational to the health and education of children, families and communities, serving as an expression of love, a form of medicine and a pathway for learning between generations.
The research influenced the Wiba Anung team’s ongoing work developing the Gikinawaabi Child Well-being Curriculum for Tribal Home Visiting programs and Tribal Head Start settings. The curriculum is organized around the Anishinaabe lunar calendar and weaves food-related knowledge and practices into activities for families, supporting children in growing, gathering, preparing and eating healthy food while engaging with Anishinaabemowin vocabulary and meeting developmental milestones.
On her first day of fieldwork in Baltimore, Intan Kumbayoni expected to begin interviewing gardeners for a research project on how city residents grow and find their food. Instead she spent the day pulling trash and wild garlic out of a vacant lot and learning what poison ivy looks like.
Kumbayoni, now a second-year doctoral student in Michigan State University’s Department of Anthropology, had gone with fellow graduate student Reilly Becchina and their supervisor to meet Ms. Paige (a pseudonym, like all gardeners’ names in this story), a gardener growing food on a city-owned lot. When they reached the address, the lot was empty. The city had reclaimed the land, and Ms. Paige had moved a few blocks away, where she and her neighbors were clearing a new lot. The researchers joined in.
“Honestly, I didn’t expect that we would end up helping to clear a new lot, but we learned a lot that day,” Kumbayoni says. As they worked, Ms. Paige talked about losing her old garden. “Looking back, Ms. Paige’s story was the first sign of a pattern we would see again and again.”
That pattern is the subject of “Urban Gardening: Precarity and Instability in Baltimore, Maryland,” which Kumbayoni and Becchina published Dec. 12, 2025, in Gleanings, an online forum of the American Anthropological Association’s Culture & Agriculture section.
Permission to grow, not to stay
The work began as Kumbayoni’s master’s project at the University of Maryland, College Park. It was part of a larger USDA-funded study, the Alternative Urban Food Provisioning Network, run across the University of Maryland, the University of Rhode Island and George Washington University. Kumbayoni joined as a medical anthropologist with training in nutrition assessment. Becchina, now a doctoral student at the University of Vermont, came from environmental anthropology.
From May through fall 2024, the two interviewed about 30 gardeners. Each visit also meant mapping the garden, recording every plant growing in it and taking soil samples, so a single interview could take half a day. It took longer when a gardener asked for help with the work.
The growing spaces varied. Some were urban farms, including one in Northeast Baltimore that grows food reflecting the cultural preferences of its predominantly Black neighborhood. Others were a church garden started with Burmese refugee members who missed the foods of home, or a single gardener’s work on a vacant lot.
Many individual growers worked through Baltimore’s Adopt-a-Lot program, which lets residents tend vacant city-owned lots. Participants get a license to use the land, not ownership, and the city can reclaim a lot at any time. Kumbayoni and Becchina’s article argues that this insecurity is not spread evenly across the city; it ties that pattern to Baltimore’s history of segregation and redlining, which left many majority-Black neighborhoods with fewer supermarkets and higher rates of food insecurity and diet-related illness.
“Food access is one of the most everyday ways that structural inequality shows up in people’s bodies, especially when we are talking about chronic conditions like diabetes,” Kumbayoni says.
Sean, another gardener, showed the researchers the irrigation system he had built and the mulch he planned to spread across his beds. A few months later he contacted them again. “The city mowed my lot,” he told them. After that, he no longer wanted to garden.
“He didn’t just lose his garden, but he lost his motivation to garden at all,” Kumbayoni says.
Making gardens more secure
For many of the gardeners they met, Kumbayoni says, gardening supported their mental and physical health, their food access and their ties to culture and community. Yet “when land can be taken away at any time, people are asked to invest their time, money, and care into something they could lose overnight.”
She would like policymakers to consider longer-term agreements, advance notice before a lot is reclaimed, and ways for gardeners to keep land they have cared for. “They also can try to see gardens as part of the city’s food and health infrastructure, not just as a way to keep vacant lots clean,” she says.
Some routes already exist. A lot can be designated community-managed open space, which takes it off the city’s list of properties for sale, but only if the city decides the garden shows enough community involvement. Groups such as Baltimore Green Space help residents acquire and preserve lots. “These show that more secure options are possible, but they are not easy for everyone to access, especially for individual gardeners,” Kumbayoni says.
Where the work led
At MSU, Kumbayoni is in the biological anthropology track with a focus on human biology and works in the Biomarker Laboratory for Anthropological Research with Dr. Masako Fujita. Her dissertation research examines skeletal maintenance and the role of uric acid, combining biomarkers from blood samples with ethnography. The question comes from Indonesia, where she has seen musculoskeletal problems, including gout and hyperuricemia, increasingly affecting younger people as well as older adults. Before graduate school, she worked as a field researcher with Germany’s international development agency, GIZ, on maternal and child health in coffee and cacao supply chains.
Gardens and blood samples look like a change of subject. Kumbayoni sees the same question running through both projects.
“Whether I was studying infant growth, nutrition, or skeletal maintenance, I think my broader interest has always been in understanding how people’s living conditions and social experiences affect their bodies and health,” she says. “My experience in Baltimore also helped me appreciate how important it is to understand people’s everyday lives and circumstances when studying health.”
Every morning, Natalie Clark passed through the entrance gate of Offutt Air Force Base, badged through multiple secured doorways, and poured herself a cup of coffee in the break room before finding out what the day would hold. Some days it was the wet lab, screening 80-year-old blankets for bone fragments. Other days it was workshops on blast trauma interpretation or ancestry estimation from teeth. On one, she sat across a table from a woman who had never met her father.
There was no typical day, Clark says. That was one of the reasons she loved it.
Clark, a doctoral student in Michigan State University’s Forensic Anthropology Laboratory, spent the summer at the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) in Omaha, Nebraska, through the Naval Research Enterprise Internship Program (NREIP). The Omaha lab is part of the DPAA’s laboratory system, the largest skeletal identification laboratory system in the world, and is accredited by the ANSI National Accreditation Board. The agency’s mission is to provide the fullest possible accounting for U.S. personnel who remain missing, a population currently over 81,000.
Finding the DPAA
Clark came to MSU last year with a background in anthropology and neuroscience but limited experience in forensic anthropology. She had taken relevant courses as an undergraduate, then spent a few years between her bachelor’s and doctoral programs working full-time as a research assistant in a developmental neuroscience lab. Once at MSU, she joined a forensic anthropology listserv to stay connected to the field.
That’s where she first saw the DPAA internship listing.
“Those who are familiar with the forensic anthropology field have heard of the DPAA and know what they do,” Clark says. “Well, I had never heard of them before, but the work sounded super interesting.”
She brought the opportunity to her advisor, Dr. Joe Hefner, associate professor of forensic anthropology, who was excited to see her interest, Clark says. What she didn’t know at the time was that Hefner had worked at the DPAA himself for several years before joining MSU.
Hefner wanted to hear what drew her to the work. Once she told him, he encouraged her to apply for the highly competitive internship. Ultimately, Clark was one of the two interns selected for the Omaha lab.
Inside the lab
Clark’s work at the DPAA ranged widely. Remains arrive at the Omaha lab through honorable carry ceremonies, formal processions in which military personnel receive transfer cases from cargo planes. Once a case was opened, the team would remove remains that had been wrapped in blankets at the time of burial, sometimes 80 years earlier. Clark’s job was to X-ray each blanket bag, then screen the soil and fabric for bone fragments that might have been missed.
“Screening consisted of unrolling the blanket, if it still had any structure left to it, and putting the clay, mud and dirt on a screen,” Clark says. “I would then pour a steady stream of water on top to let the soil run through and leave anything bigger behind.”
Other days were devoted to workshops: three- or four-hour sessions with DPAA anthropologists on topics ranging from estimating ancestry from teeth to interpreting blast trauma from aircraft crashes. Clark also tried her hand at the skeletal competency exam that every DPAA forensic anthropologist must pass before being assigned casework, using it as a benchmark for her own skills before she began helping with cases.
On quieter days, she would approach analysts on the lab floor and ask to help. She pair-matched clavicles from the Enoura Maru project, helped reassociate and organize bone fragments, and assisted analysts with active cases. She also worked alongside the lab’s other intern, Jasmine Hernandez, and the two became friends.
“At the end of every day, I was exhausted, but in a good way,” Clark says.
How much difference is too much?
Clark also conducted an independent research project during the internship, an experience she says taught her how to develop an idea from the ground up.
The idea started at MSU’s own Forensic Anthropology Laboratory. Clark’s lab had a set of skeletonized remains with a presumptive identification, meaning they had a strong guess about who the person was and needed to prove it. They obtained the individual’s medical records, which included a chest X-ray taken while the person was alive. The lab team positioned the vertebrae and took a new X-ray. The images didn’t match.
“Our conclusion was that we were wrong, and the person we thought we had is actually someone else,” Clark says. “Then along comes Dr. Hefner, who repositioned the vertebrae in a dramatic angle to best represent what the positionality would have been when they were getting the chest X-ray, and boom. It was a match.”
The initial positioning had been so far off that the radiographs looked like they came from two different people. Clark started wondering: how much of a difference in positioning is too much?
At the DPAA, she designed a study to answer that question. Her project, “Postmortem Clavicle Positioning,” asks whether changes in the angle or rotation of a bone can make X-rays of the same clavicle look different enough to complicate a match between postmortem and antemortem radiographs. To test this, she X-rayed clavicles at systematically varied angles and positions, then analyzed the shape differences using quantitative methods, including elliptical Fourier analysis and shape context. She also created a survey asking forensic anthropologists of varying experience to identify images of the same clavicle across different positions.
If her results hold up, the work could eventually help analysts determine how much positional variation they can tolerate when comparing radiographs, potentially reducing the number of postmortem X-rays needed for a given case. Clark presented preliminary findings at a DPAA staff meeting and intends to submit her research to the 2027 American Academy of Forensic Sciences conference in Orlando, Florida, with the goal of eventually publishing it as a manuscript.
“Not a dry eye in the room”
Beyond the lab work, Clark participated in experiences that connected the science to the people it serves.
She took part in multiple honorable carry ceremonies. Clark helped remove coverings and ratchet straps from each case, then stood silently outside the aircraft as they were unloaded one at a time by military personnel.
“It was a phenomenal honor being part of the team that welcomed the service members home after roughly 80 years,” Clark says.
She also attended the Korean/Cold War Annual Government Briefing, where families of unaccounted-for servicemembers hear updates from DPAA historians, analysts and leadership, and have the chance to ask questions directly. South Korea sent representatives as well, as the country is establishing its own lab to identify its war dead.
After the formal presentations, family members spoke about their lost relatives. “There was not a dry eye in the room,” Clark says. “Even though decades have passed, the connection to their family remains strong and furthers the motivation for the DPAA to keep doing what they’re doing.”
Clark and Hernandez were invited to sit in on a meeting between a family member and her Casualty Service Officer. The woman, whose father died when she was only a few months old, shared photographs of him. Historians had gathered new information, and among their findings was evidence suggesting her father had known about her birth.
“That little piece of information was enough to provide some comfort to the daughter,” Clark says.
Looking ahead
Clark credits a network of mentors and programs with making the experience possible. Hefner’s decision to take her on as a doctoral student, she says, opened the door to every opportunity she has had at MSU. She also credits MSU’s Forensic Anthropology Laboratory and the Early Start Program, which supports graduate students’ research and professional development outside the regular academic year.
At the DPAA, she thanks Dr. Rylan Tegtmeyer Hawke, her mentor at the Omaha lab, for facilitating her experiences there. She also thanks Dr. Carrie Brown, lab manager, and Dr. Franklin Damann, lab director, for accepting her as an intern and treating her like a colleague.
“I am becoming an independent scientist, have created meaningful connections with experts in the field, and have gained skills as a forensic anthropologist as well as a professional collaborator,” Clark says.
She returned to MSU with plans to continue developing her clavicle positioning research and with a reinforced conviction about the collaborative nature of identification work.
“I am not exaggerating when I say every single person I interacted with at the DPAA was fantastic,” Clark says. “Very welcoming, excited to answer questions, and overall fun and genuine people to talk to. I will forever treasure the time I spent there. And who knows, perhaps I’ll be back.”
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 can also tell things about past injuries and health disparity.”
Those characteristics form a biological profile, and Hefner said investigators use it “to develop a short list of potential individuals.” From there, they search antemortem records for missing people who match. Dental records, medical imaging and, in some cases, DNA can then help establish an identification, WLNS reported.
Michelle Fox, chief investigator for the Medical Examiner’s Office, told WLNS that cases involving skeletal remains can take time and that the timeframe for completion can’t be determined. If investigators develop no leads after 30 days, she said, case information can be submitted to a national database that compares missing and unidentified people.
Anyone with information is asked to contact the Lansing Police Department at 517-483-4600 or Crime Stoppers at 517-483-7867.
The skeleton shown on camera during the interview is not connected to the case. WLNS’s on-screen text says the remains represent an individual who donated their remains to science for research and education.
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 and Dr. Joe Hefner, published September 14 in the journal Humans, offers an answer: it does not. Collection-specific bias exists and has a measurable effect on aggregate cranial measurements, but it is not strong enough to mask the real biological differences between populations and sexes that forensic methods rely on.
Dr. Dunn and Dr. Hefner at her MSU graduation.
To test this, Dunn, who completed her doctorate at Michigan State University under Hefner’s supervision, collected craniometric data from 1,161 individuals across eight documented skeletal collections around the United States. She took 78 cranial measurements per individual using a digital measuring tool called a MicroScribe digitizer, and she did all 1,161 herself to eliminate the variable of different observers measuring slightly differently.
When the data were analyzed, individuals consistently grouped with others of the same population and sex rather than with others from the same collection. In other words, the biological signal came through clearly despite the sampling bias underneath it.
“This finding means researchers can still rely on documented skeletal collections to create and validate skeletal analytical methods, but they need to understand who is represented in a particular collection and how that collection was formed prior to sampling from it,” Dunn said.
One collection stood out. The Maxwell Museum at the University of New Mexico deviated from the pattern of the other seven, and for Dunn, that was the most unexpected finding.
“This raises questions about population histories in the American Southwest and has inspired us to pursue future research to better understand the cranial variation represented in that region,” Dunn said.
The research was partially funded by a National Institute of Justice Graduate Research Fellowship and by a Corey Endowment Award and a Research Scholars Award from MSU’s College of Social Science.
Dunn is now an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Western Carolina University. Hefner is an associate professor of anthropology at MSU and the principal investigator of MOSAIC, a $2.1 million NIJ-funded project to build the first computer program that produces a holistic biological profile from skeletal remains.
The microartifacts Megan Berry spent her summer hunting were no larger than a grain of rice, and many were far smaller. To find them, she had a pair of tweezers, a set of nested pans and her own eye for a telltale shine.
Berry, a senior in Michigan State University’s Department of Anthropology, spent the summer of 2026 as an undergraduate researcher on a project led by Dr. Phyllis Johnson and funded through the College of Social Science Provost’s Undergraduate Research Initiative (CSS-PURI). The project examined soil samples from sites of the Fort Ancient culture, a group that lived roughly 600 to 800 years ago in the Ohio Valley, including Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana and West Virginia. The soil had been collected during earlier excavations in Ohio and Kentucky and held in museum collections, most of it never analyzed.
Dr. Johnson had mentioned in class that she was looking for a paid research assistant, and the job came with travel. “I have always wanted to travel to new places and see more of the world,” Berry says. She got the position, and as summer began, so did the research.
The work took Berry and Dr. Johnson to the Dayton Society of Natural History and the Cincinnati Museum Center, where they subsampled soil from three Fort Ancient sites: the Wegerzyn Garden Site, SunWatch Village and the Hahn Site. They were after microartifacts, fragments of material too small to see without close attention. In this project, that meant anything under 6.3 millimeters. Dr. Johnson’s research centers on one kind in particular: microdebitage, the tiny flakes of stone struck off while a tool is being made. Because those flakes settle into the ground where they fall instead of being carried off like a finished tool, their distribution across a site can point to where people were making tools and what else they were doing in and around a household.
Then came the sorting, which is as painstaking as it sounds and yet somehow more satisfying. “When you are doing the analysis, it is actually quite boring,” Berry says. The soil passes through seven nested pans, each with smaller openings than the last, in a process she likens to panning for gold. Whatever settles out is separated by hand with tweezers, first by eye and then under a microscope when a fragment is uncertain. Berry found she could often pick out a likely piece by its shine or color before it was confirmed. “I just have a good eye for these things,” she says. The payoff, when a sample she had sorted turned out to be something worth keeping, had her feeling “like a kid on Christmas.”
From the museums, the samples traveled with Berry and Dr. Johnson to the Microartifacts Lab at Vanderbilt University, where 170 samples from SunWatch Village were analyzed, and then to the Cultural Resources Lab (CuRL) at MSU, where roughly 400 of them are still being sorted by hand. This fall, Dr. Johnson will use machine learning on the larger dataset to locate where stone tools were being made at SunWatch Village.
Somewhere in that work, Berry turned up a finding of her own. Using geographic information systems (GIS) to map where animal bone appeared in soil from two houses at SunWatch Village, she noticed the fragments were not scattered at random. In her preliminary analysis, larger faunal remains clustered near the doors and edges of each house and smaller microbone toward the hearths and central areas, a pattern that she and Dr. Johnson read as a possible sign of separate spaces for preparing and eating food. That finding is the work she is turning into a poster for the 2027 University Undergraduate Research and Arts Forum (UURAF) at MSU.
For Berry, the summer pointed somewhere she had not expected. “I always kind of have been interested in bones,” she says, “but after all this, I could consider going into zooarchaeology.” The experience, she says, gave her “a glimpse into what real archaeology is.”
At an inland site in Marquette County, archaeologists have recovered iron scissors, lead shot, kettle fragments, glass beads and a small assemblage of iconographic rings. Radiocarbon dates from charred material and moose bone there average to the 1630s. It is some of the earliest evidence for European-manufactured goods in Michigan.
How those objects got there is not settled. They may have arrived ahead of the Europeans who made them, moving inland along Indigenous exchange networks that were already carrying goods deep into the continent. Dr. Jessica L. Yann writes that ideas about the European newcomers would have circulated along the same routes.
That possibility, that the things arrived before the people, is where Dr. Yann begins her chapter opening Post-Contact Archaeology of Michigan and the Upper Great Lakes Region, published by Berghahn Books. Dr. Yann is Michigan State University’s NAGPRA Program Manager and holds a secondary appointment as an archaeologist in MSU’s Department of Anthropology. She earned her doctorate there in 2019.
Her argument is that “contact” has been asked to do too much work. Used generically, the word compresses two centuries of shifting, uneven, wildly varied relationships into a single event, as though one world ended and another began on a particular afternoon. She does not propose abandoning the term. She proposes breaking it apart.
Four kinds of contact
In place of a single moment, and building on earlier research, Dr. Yann sets out a continuum with four categories. Encroachment covers the earliest period, when European material culture reached Indigenous communities through down-the-line trade rather than face-to-face meeting. Entanglement follows, once Europeans were physically present in small numbers, holding little economic or political power, and the two groups began interacting directly. Symmetrical interaction describes the fort-building era, when colonial powers marked a physical frontier and every group involved had to compromise in order to hold onto its political and economic independence. Shatter zone covers the violence after 1750, through the Seven Years’ War, Pontiac’s Rebellion and the War of 1812, and the Indigenous strategies of resilience and survivance that ran through it.
Framework from Jessica L. Yann, “Rethinking ‘Contact’” in Post-Contact Archaeology of Michigan and the Upper Great Lakes Region (Berghahn Books).
Dr. Yann is explicit that the categories overlap. People at a single site may have experienced interactions belonging to several at once. The point is not a cleaner set of boxes but a better set of questions about power and economic relationships.
The questions we ask
The chapter’s most concrete work is not in re-dating individual sites but in reframing the questions archaeologists ask, shifting away from settler narratives about which Europeans arrived first and toward a closer examination of how Native communities adjusted and responded to colonial encroachment.
The Cloudman site, in Chippewa County, shows what that shift looks like. Described in 1999 as perhaps the earliest of Michigan’s contact sites, it was reconsidered in later work. A copper knife once read as a Native American reproduction of a French clasp knife turned out to be a native copper knife with a bent tang. Chemical analysis of glass beads from the site pointed to a recipe used between 1670 and 1700. On that reading, Cloudman belongs to the period of entanglement, roughly four decades later than its reputation.
Approached this way, Dr. Yann argues, the questions get more interesting. How Native American communities persisted and adapted reveals more about the chaos of being human than the question of who arrived first.
Her chapter opens an edited volume of nineteen, ranging across the Upper Great Lakes from French trading posts and Great Lakes shipwrecks to twentieth-century Detroit. Several of its contributors trained in or work for MSU’s Department of Anthropology. Dr. Lynn L. M. Evans draws together six decades of research at Fort Michilimackinac. Dr. Sean B. Dunham examines what Odawa cache pits reveal about long-term connections to place. Dr. Stacey Camp, who directs the MSU Campus Archaeology Program, co-wrote a chapter on childhood on the MSU campus with two program alumni. The introduction is free to read on the publisher’s website, and the book is available from Berghahn in hardback and e-book.
Why the word matters
Dr. Yann’s conclusion is that the evidence does not describe one contact event. It describes a series of strategies by Native American communities engaging with Europeans and their material culture on their own terms, in forms that shifted over time. Encroachment, she argues, was a larger and more meaningful process than the field has recognized.
She also turns the argument on archaeologists. Sites from these periods can be hard to recognize, and researchers who do not know what to look for can miss the evidence of Native persistence entirely, reproducing the settler narratives they set out to interrogate. Being reflexive about how those assumptions shape interpretation is, in her framing, part of the work.
She frames the chapter as another step toward recognizing the variety of voices and experiences in the past, and toward a plainer point. As Dr. Yann writes, “contact” does not mean the same thing to everyone all of the time.
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 was later challenged for its handling of archaeological context. Turning to his own work, he walks through the bioarchaeological data from caves and rock shelters across central Belize, where he began working in 2005 with the Central Belize Archaeological Survey (CBAS) Project. The talk covers what skeletal age distributions, taphonomic processes and new DNA evidence actually reveal about how and why the ancient Maya used subterranean spaces for mortuary practices during the Classic period (roughly 250 to 900 CE).
The core argument: when you look at who is buried in caves alongside who is buried in elite tomb contexts elsewhere in the Maya area, the age distributions start to complement each other rather than signal something violent. Children and young adults appear in caves; middle-aged and older adults appear in tombs. Put them together and the picture looks less like targeted sacrifice than like a community distributing most of its dead across different spaces according to social rules we are still working to understand.
“I just feel like archaeology shouldn’t feed into those narratives when there is better science and better, more interesting stories to tell.”
— Dr. Gabriel Wrobel
Dr. Wrobel also addresses a pattern he has encountered in the published literature and in conversation with colleagues: surface damage to bones being read as evidence of perimortem trauma without adequate taphonomic analysis. Water, mineral deposits and insects all leave marks that can mimic cut marks or blunt force injury. His lab’s work on insect damage to human skeletal remains, including termite and dermestid beetle activity, has documented how easily those processes are misread.
Dr. Wrobel directs the MSU Bioarchaeology Laboratory and is currently leading a new archaeological project at Sarteneja on the Chetumal Bay in northern Belize. He teaches courses in bioarchaeology, paleopathology, biocultural anthropology and introduction to biological anthropology.
This presentation was a part of theAztlander guest lecture series.
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 an appreciation for the country’s culture, history, and educational system, and I knew I wanted to return in a more meaningful capacity,” Arnold said.
“Fulbright offers the opportunity to build genuine relationships with students and the local community while continuing to improve my Korean language skills and deepen my understanding of international education and global exchanges.”
— Catelyn Arnold
Arnold hopes the experience will help her build a career centered on education, international exchange, and student support. Through her future work, she strives to create opportunities for students to engage across cultures and form meaningful global connections.
“Receiving a Fulbright is an incredible honor and represents the culmination of years of studying Korean language and culture,” Arnold said. “I’m grateful for the opportunity to return as a Fulbright ETA, where I hope to learn from my students and community just as much as I hope to contribute. I’m excited to continue building meaningful cross-cultural connections through education.”
Established in 1946, the Fulbright Program is the U.S. government’s premier international academic exchange program. Each year it provides opportunities for exceptional Americans and participants from 160 countries and locations to study, teach and conduct research abroad, advancing knowledge, science and industry through international exchange and collaboration. Fulbright alumni achieve distinction and are recognized as leaders in government, business, science, technology, research, education and the arts.
“Congratulations to the impressive group of MSU scholars and students offered Fulbright Program awards for the coming academic year,” said MSU Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs Laura Lee McIntyre. “The inquiry and innovation represented in their projects exemplify the university’s long-standing commitment to global engagement — and to our founding mission to advance knowledge and transform lives.”
Portions of this article previously appeared on MSU Today.
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, and on behalf of SAA regularly lobbied and testified to the U.S. Congress on legislation, public policy and federal funding. Lovis’ career contributions are abundant and continue to guide the evolution of heritage resource policies across numerous State and Federal public landholding units.
He also developed the initial cultural resource inventories and management plans for Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, the Hiawatha and Huron-Manistee National Forests, Fisherman’s Island State Park, the Ionia State Recreation Area and other public lands. His substantial expertise in field archaeology and project management was central to several of the initial large scale site mitigation projects in Michigan, resulting in significant research outcomes and providing protocol templates for other such data recovery enterprises to emulate.
As an educator, Professor Lovis regularly applied his pedagogical talents to the training of Federal land managers from the U.S. Departments of the Interior and Agriculture, and he continues to do so. At Michigan State University, Professor Lovis developed and for more than 25 years taught a foundational course in Public Archaeology, providing an archaeological and historic preservation springboard for both graduate and undergraduate students. It should be no surprise that many of the graduate students he mentored chose public or private sector careers in historic preservation and archaeological heritage management.
The MHPN award is fitting recognition of his many enduring contributions. The MSU Department of Anthropology is proud to call Lovis one of our own.
