From Dr. Todd Fenton, Department Chair and Professor of Anthropology:
“On behalf of the faculty, I am writing to express our collective shock and sorrow at the violent attack in Georgia this past week. We condemn the brutal murder of Daoyou Feng, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Soon Chung Park, Xiaojie Tan, Yong Ae Yue, Delaina Ashley Yaun, and Paul Andre Michels; eight individuals whose lives were taken in an act of hate. Six of the victims were Asian American women, and we recognize that these murders happened in a larger context of xenophobia, misogyny, and racism that has deep roots in US history. Further, we recognize that these hateful crimes aimed at Asian Pacific Islander Desi Americans (APIDA) and Asian communities have intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic.
This horrifying act has redoubled our efforts, started last summer, to not only take a strong stand against hate, but also to create a more inclusive and tolerant culture within our own university community. As such, we stand in alliance with others within the MSU community asking for greater attention be given to the violence and harm that these communities have suffered, and to amplify the voices who are seeking substantive change. APIDA/AFSA, APASO, and OCAT have organized a town hall and vigil on Thursday, March 25th that is open to the entire MSU community. Registration for the event can be found at the following link: https://msu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_NObwUtHVQWy4NgAs5DB1kQ?fbclid=IwAR0el6IqXNiqndNya62qJVNj6yu-A4WpgDWk7i7lfYt_5fuWm2wVuRhGydI“
Department of Anthropology Assistant Professor Lucero Radonic was recently an invited panelist for the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The title of the panel was “Household Water Insecurity in the Global North” which discussed setting a research agenda for studies of water insecurity. Dr. Radonic’s research focuses on the intersections of water rights and infrastructure, the science and micropolitics of climate change, and urbanization in Latin America and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Through her work, Dr. Radonic also seeks to expand the methods toolkit for social science research in human-environmental relations through engagement in interdisciplinary collaborations and methodological innovation.
“Session Description: This panel extends new scholarship that reveals water security in the Global North to be a myth, and explores what can be done about it. Taking a relational approach, we argue household water insecurity is a product of institutionalized structures and power, manifests unevenly through space and time, and is reproduced places many assume are water‐secure. Our research shows how “social infrastructure”—relationships, cultural norms, and informal institutions—can address people’s urgent needs for safe, sufficient water against the backdrop of gaps in public water provision. Research and policy roadmaps to build from this work will be discussed.”
Department of Anthropology Associate Professor Gabriel Wrobel recently co-authored an article in Quarternary International with several colleagues, including first author Dr. Sally Wasef (Griffith University) and Dr. Michael Westaway (The University of Queensland). The article is titled “A contextualised review of genomic evidence for gene flow events between Papuans and Indigenous Australians in Cape York, Queensland.” The article discusses currently available genomic data to explore whether the movement of cultural traits from New Guinea and/or the Torres Strait Islands into Cape York was accompanied by gene flow events between 8000 years ago and the colonial period.
Abstract: “It has long been accepted that the Indigenous groups of Australia’s Cape York Peninsula have numerous cultural traits that were adopted from people in New Guinea and/or the Torres Strait Islands after the formation of the Torres Strait around 8000 years ago. However, opinions differ on whether the movement of the traits in question was accompanied by gene flow events. Some argue for a significant amount of gene flow resulting from voyages from New Guinea and the Torres Strait Islands down the east coast of Cape York. Others contend that there was only contact at the northern end of the Cape and that the cultural traits spread through down-the-line transmission. In recent years partnerships between Australian institutions and Indigenous communities in Cape York have led to new genetic research that provides benefits to both parties. We review the currently available genetic data that have the potential to shed light on this issue, concluding that the data are inconsistent with significant gene flow between Indigenous Australians and Papuan people between 8000 years ago and the colonial period. There are indications of gene flow, but it most likely occurred in the Pleistocene rather than the Holocene. As such, the currently available genomic data do not support the hypothesis that the diffusion of cultural traits from New Guinea and/or the Torres Strait Islands into Cape York was accompanied by gene flow. The data suggest instead that the cultural traits most probably spread via down-the-line trade, exchange, and imitation. Our review highlights the gaps in the available genomic information from contemporary and ancestral descendants of Australia’s first settlers, and we suggest that researchers adopt a more collaborative approach, involving Indigenous communities and their knowledge in project design, data collection, and dissemination, in future genomic studies in Australia.”
The Department of Anthropology congratulates PhD candidate Anna Martínez-Hume, who recently received the Rita S. Gallin Award for Best Graduate Paper on Women and Gender in Global Perspective. Martínez-Hume’s paper is titled “I’ve lived it in my own flesh: Empowerment, Feminist Solidarity and NGO worker subjectivity in Maya, Guatemala.” This honor is among the MSU Center for Gender in Global Context 2021 Inspiration Awards, which are “given to woman-identified individuals who demonstrate integrity, leadership, quality performance, integrative and inclusive action, and influence on campus and in the community.” Martínez-Hume studies medical anthropology, neoliberalism and healthcare systems, policy discourse analysis, organizational ethnology, NGO studies, Healthcare NGOs in Guatemala and Indigenous Maya.
Department of Anthropology Associate Professor Stacey L. Camp is second author on the recently published textbook Introducing Archaeology (3rd edition, University of Toronto Press, 2020) with co-author Bob Muckle of Capilano University. Dr. Camp’s contributions to the book address contemporary issues in archaeology, such as archaeologists’ involvement in the Dakota Access Pipeline, the archaeology of space junk, the archaeology of climate change, and attempts at making the discipline more accessible to people of all walks of life.
Department of Anthropology Associate Professor Najib Hourani has been elected to the Editorial Board of the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP). The MERIP was established in 1971 to educate and inform the public about contemporary Middle East affairs. This organization publishes the Middle East Report, a widely read scholarly publication that provides analyses of current events and issues, as well as frequent articles, updates, and educational primers on its website. The MERIP “provides critical, alternative reporting and analysis, focusing on state power, political economy and social hierarchies as well as popular struggles and the role of U.S. policy in the region.”
Department of Anthropology undergraduate student Reid Ellefson-Frank was featured as the Diversity Torch in this month’s College of Social Science Diversity Matters recognizing International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27. International Holocaust Remembrance Day commemorates the millions of Holocaust victims and enjoins individuals to promote programs to prevent further genocides. The College of Social Science Diversity Torches celebrate students who uphold a diversity value or ideal. As “Diversity Torches,” they provide light, guidance, and awareness to their fellow students and all who see them.
Mr. Ellefson-Frank is a third-year College of Social Science undergraduate majoring in Anthropology, whose recent work on tourism at Auschwitz, and Auschwitz’s archaeological environment earned the regard of his professors: “When it comes to remembering the Holocaust, there is no student better equipped to tackle the topic than anthropology junior Reid Ellefson-Frank. An East Lansing native with a global mindset, Reid’s academic interests focus on understanding the politics of collective memory, and how to memorialize tragic events such as genocides and wars…” Click here to read more
Department of Anthropology Professor Emeritus William Lovis recently published National Park Service, Midwest Archaeological Center, Technical Report 145 titled Site 20LU115, Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore: Synthesis of Archeological and Environmental Data Recovery. National Park Service (NPS) Technical Report 145, funded by the Cooperative Environmental Studies Unit of the NPS, compiles and synthesizes all of the known archaeological and related environmental information for archaeological sites at Sleeping Bear Point in the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. This multidisciplinary research is coauthored with dune geomorphologist Dr. Alan Arbogast of the MSU Department of Geography, and the late Dr. G. William Monaghan, a geologist from Indiana University.
The research monograph analyses and presents both past and newly acquired information, and synopsizes it into a series of recommendations for future management in the face of ongoing climate change. Given the sensitive nature of the information related to these heritage resources, the report is only available by request from the NPS Midwest Archaeological Center in Lincoln Nebraska.
Associate Professor Gabriel Wrobel’s interest in the bioarchaeology of ancient Maya began as an undergraduate student during a fieldschool in Belize. After working at one of the rockshelter sites for a day, he felt a profound connection to the area and its stunning landscape. He decided in that moment that he would pursue a PhD and run his own fieldschool there. Twelve years later, Dr. Wrobel took his first group of students to continue work at that same site. Once Dr. Wrobel began working there, he expanded his research to include a variety of new sites, including caves, rockshelters, and buildings.
Since 2005, Dr. Wrobel has directed a field project in central Belize, which includes an Education Abroad fieldschool program providing undergraduate students hands-on research training. Dr. Wrobel, his graduate and undergraduate students, and the project’s staff have worked mostly in caves and rockshelters but have also carried out excavations of buildings at a few urban centers in their research area. The cave and rockshelter sites were used for a variety of ritual activities, including burial. The research team’s analyses of the artifacts and skeletons recovered from these sites focus on reconstructing the elaborate and diverse ritual practices, and on identifying aspects of the lives and deaths of individuals who lived in the surrounding area 1000–2300 years ago.
With the aim to build a local culture history of central Belize, Dr. Wrobel and his students study evidence of people’s lives and deaths that are preserved in their bones. This includes reconstructing diet from isotopes in their bones and teeth, finding evidence of disease, recording patterns of intentional cranial modification and tooth filing, and documenting diversity of mortuary treatment. From these data they determine how variations in biology and culture changed over time and interpret these patterns by considering the social, ecological, political, and economic contexts that shaped people’s lives.
Dr. Wrobel and his team’s work has built significantly on previous research in the region. For example, excavations of several rockshelter sites have provided evidence for the presence of Archaic hunter-gatherers in the region several thousand years ago, and the establishment of small farming villages by 300 BC. They have also reported the region’s largest urban center—a site they named Tipan Chen Uitz (Fortress Well Mountain)—where they found several large carved monuments with writing. Dr. Wrobel and his team’s work at Tipan and other large civic-ceremonial centers in the area have demonstrated a sudden growth of population size and social complexity beginning in the 6th century AD. Furthermore, they can see evidence of economic and political ties with other areas of the Maya world. Dr. Wrobel and his team’s work in the deep caves has documented extensive evidence for the mortuary use of these contexts, providing important information about social and political changes to the region’s population during the height of Classic Maya civilization.
From the perspective of Maya history, Dr. Wrobel and his team have been able to fill in a large gap that was central Belize. Their research has provided valuable information about the region’s development over time, and the role that external political forces had in shaping that development. From a more general anthropological perspective, they use the data from central Belize to help answer broader biocultural questions about humans and human society. Dr. Wrobel and his team’s work particularly demonstrates how local communities are able to adapt and change in response to environmental limitations and to new political pressures.
Dr. Wrobel and his research team have published their research from central Belize in numerous articles in journals and edited volumes, as well as in several dissertations and theses by graduate students. Additionally, every year following fieldwork, technical reports describing their research and results are given to the Belize government’s archaeology office and made available to the public through their Central Belize Archaeological Survey (CBAS) Project website.
The CBAS field project is on a temporary hiatus, but they continue to analyze their excavated materials and publish their findings. Next year, Dr. Wrobel hopes to return to the field and will start a new project excavating at an ancient coastal Maya trading site on an island off the coast of northern Belize.
Department of Anthropology Associate Professors Gabriel Wrobel and Stacey Camp recently published a new article in The Conversation titled “How do archaeologists know where to dig?”. In the article, Drs. Wrobel and Camp discuss the evidence and methods used to find archaeological sites.
