The Department of Anthropology Alumni and Friends of Archaeology Expendable Fund and William A. Lovis Research Fund in Environmental Archaeology were awarded to PhD student Emily Milton. Marking its third year, the Alumni and Friends of Archaeology research award was established to enhance research and learning of undergraduate and graduate students in our archaeology program. This was the inaugural year for the William A. Lovis endowment, which celebrates Dr. Lovis’s commitment to research, specifically to that examining human-environment interactions prior to Euro-American colonization episodes worldwide.

The funds from these awards enabled Milton to travel to Peru last summer and finish a research project that identifies altitudinal and seasonal change in oxygen isotopes from surface water in the South-Central Andes. Archaeologists use water samples to construct an environmental baseline for isotopic signals in various regions. By establishing an isotopic baseline for Southern Peru, archaeologists will be able to improve the reliability of studies that use isotopes from human and animal remains to investigate past human behavior. Over the past three years, Milton has collected 100 water samples from the Majes River Drainage system, which will help in understanding the temporal variation in surface waters.

The William A. Lovis award funded Milton, her advisor, Dr. Kurt Rademaker, and another student to travel from the Peruvian south coast to the Central Andean highlands. Over a three-day sampling period, they collected 49 samples from 50 to 4800 meters above sea level. The Alumni and Friends of Archaeology funds covered airfare for Milton to fly to Peru to continue research on the artifacts from Cuncaicha Rock Shelter and to help excavate two prehistoric high-altitude sites, Pachamachay and Panaulauca.

Milton is currently analyzing the results of her water sampling and hopes to publish the findings soon. These data will allow Milton to launch new investigations into the isotopic composition of the Peruvian highlands, as well as support interpretations of oxygen isotopes from archaeological sites throughout the Majes drainage system. Milton is sincerely grateful for the support from the Anthropology Alumni and Friends of Archaeology Expendable Fund and William A. Lovis Research Fund in Environmental Archaeology.

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Graduate student Brian Geyer received a 2019 Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA) award to investigate how aspects of Kenya tech sector professionals’ identities—including gender, ethnicity, religion, and socioeconomic status—affect their positions of social, political, and economic power in the sector. This March, Geyer will leave for Kenya and split one year between technology innovation hubs in Nairobi and Kisumu. During this time, he will engage with a diversity of educational and professional organizations, such as computer science programs at several Kenyan universities and tech start-ups.

Currently, international development organizations often take a gender-based approach to projects, due to studies that found improvements in women’s lives correlate to advancements in their communities or countries as a whole. However, such programs do not account for other kinds of vulnerable populations and existing issues within their communities or countries. This deficit may unintentionally exacerbate those problems by intensifying them among professional colleagues. In Kenya, the country’s technology sector has enjoyed a lot of attention from venture capitalists seeking international investment opportunities. Development agencies view the sector’s recent and expected growth as an opportunity to contribute to Kenya’s overall development. Organizations are implementing these gender-based improvement projects in Kenya’s tech sector in hopes of lifting the population overall.

However, Geyer is curious how effective this gender-only approach will be at addressing the needs of disadvantaged Kenyans and how the financial investment by venture capitalists will impact existing inequalities. Through his research, Geyer will investigate several questions, including: do women and men hold significantly different tech sector jobs and to what extent might this reflect different desires for these positions; do differences among jobs found in the industry inhibit one’s sense of professional cohesion; and, how does ethnicity and religious affiliation intersect and influence perceptions of professional cohesion. Geyer believes that examining these questions will shed light on more effective ways to address inequalities, such as taking an intersectional approach to targeting people for developmental support. He hopes his research will contribute to understanding the relationship between aspects of identity and power.

Throughout his studies, Geyer has highly valued the support and mentorship from his advisor, Dr. Chantal Tetreault, whose active encouragement of his research and guidance in writing effective grant applications he greatly appreciates. Dr. Tetreault helped him incorporate the community of practice framework into his research for conceptually organizing participants in a meaningful way, given their geographic, ethnic, and organizational diversity. She also advised Geyer on diversifying his practical experience in digital technologies with respect to education and research.

Geyer’s interest in Kenya stems from his Peace Corps service there as a public health volunteer prior to coming to MSU. Through his graduate studies here, he developed a keen interest in technologists and other tech sector professionals through the department’s Cultural Heritage Informatics fellowship led by Dr. Ethan Watrall, as well as through his former graduate assistant position in LEADR—the digital technology education lab, which is a collaboration between the Anthropology and History departments.

Geyer has returned to Kenya several times to conduct predissertation data collection and international development research. In his time there, he has worked with tech professionals at IBM Research–Africa, college students at several Kenyan universities, and tech innovation hubs. He was also hired by the World Bank as a contractor to start a research project in Nairobi. Geyer has greatly benefitted from MSU’s Swahili language courses, facilitated by several Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships.

After completing his PhD, Geyer hopes to remain in academia as faculty or work at a nonprofit continuing his research.

Follow Brian Geyer’s project through his online open field journal: No Mud Huts nomudhuts.matrix.msu.edu

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This fall, the MSU Forensic Anthropology Laboratory (MSUFAL) led a week-long training course for the Michigan State Police (MSP) on the analyses of human remains in the forensic death investigation. During this course, Michigan police from across the state learned about what information can be gained with forensic anthropology, how the methods involved in examining human remains are used, and how to properly excavate human remains from a burial so that evidence about the case is not lost.

The first two days of the course involved lectures on forensic anthropological methods. These lectures were given by anthropology faculty Dr. Joseph Hefner and Dr. Carolyn Isaac, and PhD students Mari Isa, Amber Plemons, Kelly Kamnikar, and Alex Goots. After the first day of lecture, attendees were assigned a skeleton from the MSUFAL’s donated collection and tasked with estimating the age at death, biological sex, ancestry, and stature of the individual based on what they learned.

After this series of lectures, participants went into the field for a day to learn how to search for clandestine burials and properly recover human remains. Four mock burials had been created the previous spring by burying plastic skeletons with fake evidence. Once the groups of state police located the mock burials, MSUFAL members taught them how to map, photograph, document, and correctly excavate a burial to recover human remains.

On the final day of the course, participants presented their findings from the skeletal analyses and mock cases, discussing the different methodological approaches they took for their specific burial circumstances. As the MSUFAL team and Michigan State Police continue working together in casework across the state, this training will facilitate best practices in cases involving human remains.

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Boozhoo-Aaniin. I am currently in my senior year majoring in Anthropology with a minor in American Indian and Indigenous Studies. My academic interests lie in the intersection of physical anthropology and museum studies, with a focus on the status of NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act) remains in museum collections and Indigenous community–museum relationships.

Last summer, I worked on the North American Human Remains Care and Curation Project at the Field Museum of Natural History as the Mullins-Martin North American Biological Anthropology Intern. During my time at the Field, I performed osteological analysis on approximately 150 catalogue numbers of Indigenous human remains from throughout the U.S. and Canada. Additionally, I helped photograph and rehouse the individuals and their associated funerary objects. This ongoing project is designed to standardize human remains catalogues in a digitally accessible format, such that Indigenous communities have increased access to NAGPRA materials and repatriations can be more easily facilitated. This internship not only strengthened my osteology skills, but gave me insight into the realities of NAGPRA in museum institutions, and the challenges Indigenous communities face in righting the wrongs done to their cultures and ancestors.

My internship at the Field is in part due to the host of opportunities given to me by MSU and the Department of Anthropology. The most influential among these was the chance to participate in graduate level coursework, providing me greater exposure to various sub-fields and allowing me to build my skill set. My professors for these graduate courses, Dr. Todd Fenton and Dr. Heather Howard, are also my academic mentors. Their willingness to move outside their specializations and help me build my own path of study is a testament to their exceptional scholarship and dedication to their students.

It is difficult for me to recollect when I became interested in anthropology, but I feel studying what makes us human, both in body and in action, is what drew me to this major. The evolving nature of the discipline and the willingness of its practitioners to work outside their sub-fields to collaborate and create dynamic bodies of knowledge fits with my varied interests. As an Indigenous individual and citizen of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, anthropology gave me the space to blend my research and career interests with my desire to remain close to my Anishinaabe heritage and Anishinaabewaki.

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This past May and June, the MSU Campus Archaeology Program (CAP) hosted a 4-week undergraduate archaeology field school on campus. Fifteen undergraduate students were enrolled in the course; thirteen undergraduates were from MSU or MSU alumni and the other two students commuted from the University of Michigan, Flint.

The goal of this field project was to find artifacts in association with an historic homestead located next to Holmes Hall on the corner of Shaw Road and Hagadorn Road. The property was once occupied by the Toolan family from 1870 until approximately 1920. The property was rented out to several different families in the 1940s. In June of 1953, warranty deeds show that the Toolan family sold the property to MSU. Between 1953 and 1965, MSU demolished the homestead in preparation for the construction of Holmes Hall, which was built in 1965.

Over the course of the field season, we excavated three 2×2 meter excavation units and two 1×1 meter excavation units. Artifacts recovered from the field school that date to the time period in which these families occupied the landscape include a Phillips Milk of Magnesia cobalt blue glass bottle fragment dating from 1900 to ca.1915; an aqua glass mineral water/soda bottle with an applied finish dating from 1875 to 1920; a 1937 mercury Dime; and a lapel pin from The Home Insurance Company that was founded in 1853. Another curious and exciting archaeological find was a small ceramic fragment featuring a logo used by MSU between 1925 and 1955. The project culminated in a public archaeology outreach day where students could share what they found and what they learned from excavations.

Students learned archaeological field methodologies, archival research, artifact dating and identification, and how to use digital tools and tablets to document and record archaeological data. MSU Archives gave students a tour of the many historical resources on campus. Jerry Wahl, Campus Arborist, trained our students in how to excavate near and around tree roots as to avoid killing our campus’ historic and contemporary trees. Undergraduate student Mary Murphy did a workshop on artifact illustration for our field school students. Jack Biggs, a current PhD student in our program, taught our students photogrammetry and artifact 3D modeling. Munsell, who makes soil color books used in archaeological fieldwork and is a Michigan-based company, visited our site and showed field school students and staff how to use their new Munsell CAPSURE Color Matching Tool. This tool is a small hand-held device that identifies different colors of soil.

The field school would not have been a success without the dedicated time and effort our staff and volunteers put into training our students. Jeff Burnett, a current PhD student in the Department of Anthropology, served as the field school’s teaching assistant and was an immense help to the project. Campus Archaeologist and current PhD student Autumn Painter put a great deal of time into making sure this project and several other projects taking place on campus during the summer were successful. Campus Archaeology Staff members Jeff Painter, Amber Plemons, and Jack Biggs, GIS intern and MSU undergraduate David Mainero, MSU undergraduate Andrew Taylor, and alumni Louis Kelley and Amy Hair also helped in teaching and training our undergraduate field school students. Thank you to Infrastructure, Planning, and Facilities (IPF) and MSU Archives for their continued support of Campus Archaeology.

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Over the course of the past few years, Dr. Mindy Morgan (left) has been exploring the history of anthropology and engaging in new conversations regarding our disciplinary past. Dr. Morgan is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and affiliated faculty member of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies program, as well as the Graduate Program Director for the Department of Anthropology, specializing in sociocultural and linguistic anthropology.

Dr. Morgan’s recent work grew from her larger investigation into the periodical Indians at Work, which was published by the Office of Indian Affairs in the 1930s and contained articles authored by bureaucrats, tribal members, and anthropologists. Dr. Ruth M. Underhill, an anthropologist trained by Franz Boas at Columbia University, was one of these contributors.

Dr. Morgan first wrote about Dr. Underhill’s contributions to anthropological debates at the time in her 2017 article “Anthropologists in Unexpected Places: Tracing Anthropological Theory, Practice, and Policy in Indians at Work,” which was published in the esteemed journal American Anthropologist. During this time, Dr. Morgan also helped coordinate a roundtable for the American Anthropological Association meetings in Minneapolis that allowed her to think more deeply about the ways in which Underhill participated in both the production and circulation of disciplinary knowledge in the early 20th century.  Dr. Morgan’s recent article, “Look Once More at the Old Things: Ruth Underhill’s O’odham Text Collections” which appears in Histories of Anthropology Annual (volume 13), grew out of the paper for the roundtable.

In her new article, Dr. Morgan looks at the ways in which Underhill’s collection of O’odham songs and texts in the early 20th century was taken up by others decades later, and reinterpreted according to the needs of the contemporary community. Many of the songs collected by Underhill for her seminal work Singing for Power were retranslated and republished in the 1970s by several O’odham community members working in collaboration with an anthropologist. Their work, Rainhouse and Ocean: Speeches for the Papago Year, does not just reproduce Underhill’s text but extends them by offering new insights and analyses of the songs. A later edition of Singing for Power was issued that carried an introduction by Ofelia Zepeda, an O’odham linguist and scholar working within the language revitalization movement of the early 1990s. This movement sought to ensure the survival of languages at risk of disappearing.

Dr. Morgan looks at how these various processes of texts extracted from their original contexts not only bring new meanings, but new opportunities for transmission and circulation. A central argument in the article is that Underhill’s manner of both collecting and representing the song texts was prescient and indicated her own belief that these texts would and should continue to circulate among the O’odham community for generations to come.

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The Department of Anthropology is pleased to welcome Dr. Gabriel Sanchez, who joins us as a Research Associate after completing his doctorate in anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Sanchez is part of the inaugural class of the College of Social Science Dean’s Research Associate Program. This program promotes an inclusive scholarly environment, in which outstanding scholars in the social sciences support the advancement of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the academy.

Dr. Sanchez became interested in anthropology during his first semester of community college following his discharge from the United States Army. He was attracted to the field and its study of the human experience and culture, especially of marginalized communities. The next semester, Dr. Sanchez applied for a variety of jobs and was hired as an archaeological technician for the United States Forest Service. In this position, he met the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer (THPO) of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde and became an intern at the THPO office. These experiences shaped his interest in indigenous archaeology and collaborative research.

During his undergraduate education at the University of Oregon, Dr. Sanchez earned a position in the McNair Scholars program, a federal initiative to increase the attainment of advanced degrees by underrepresented students. As a first-generation student raised in rural California by a family of undocumented farmworkers, he believed it was important to receive an education to better his life and that of his family. Dr. Sanchez was particularly drawn to conducting field and laboratory research in environmental anthropology that could provide benefits for indigenous collaborators and federal and state agencies.

An indigenous and environmental anthropological archaeologist, Dr. Sanchez investigates human-environmental relationships from the Terminal Pleistocene and throughout the Holocene. Long-term environmental data from archaeological sites have relevancy beyond archaeology by providing historical baselines that can inform modern resource management and stewardship through the documentation of historical ranges of variability. Currently, Dr. Sanchez is collaborating with the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band and California State Parks to investigate the native range of California’s endangered salmon species, which are vulnerable to extinction or extirpation. This research will define which salmon were native to coastal streams to help resource managers prioritize stream protection, restoration, and water allocation, as well as inform land-use practices.

At this time, Dr. Sanchez is mentoring nine MSU undergraduates in archaeological methods and laboratory analyses of two archaeological sites he excavated with students from the University of California, Berkeley, and stewards from the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band. Together they hope these data will provide information to help define which salmon species used specific coastal streams and, through genetic analyses of ancient and modern salmon, identify the stocks that should be used to guide the restoration of these species. In this role, Dr. Sanchez enjoys training undergraduate and graduate students in field and laboratory methods, archaeological method and theory, and community-engaged research strategies. Dr. Sanchez recently published an article in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports that investigates ancient stewardship of California’s marine and estuarine fisheries through selective harvesting techniques, such as gill nets.

Outside of work, Dr. Sanchez enjoys playing music from the genre Son Jarcho—Afro-Indigenous music from southern Mexico born out of the Spanish colonial era. He also appreciates exploring the state of Michigan with his wife, Janae, and they are eagerly awaiting the birth of their daughter who is due in March.

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