Assistant Professor Dr. Kurt Rademaker is the Principal Investigator of a 3-year NSF Archaeology project entitled, “Social Adaptation in a Highly Varied Spatial Environment” (BCS-1659015), which will close next year. This project focuses on some of the earliest archaeological sites known in South America to learn about the timing of initial settlement, the routes used to settle various ecological zones, and the formation of inter-zonal social connections.

At the end of the last ice age, hunter-gatherers successfully colonized nearly every ecological zone in the western hemisphere within a few thousand years. In South America, these environments included the hyper-arid Pacific coast where fisherfolk exploited the bounty of the sea, and the rugged Andes up to 4500 m (~14,800 feet) above sea level where camelid hunters lived in base camps in highland oases. These coastal and highland sites are linked through shared raw materials and artifacts, but whether the sites were made by one group moving inter-zonally or multiple groups settling both coast and highlands is unknown.

Dr. Rademaker has been leading an interdisciplinary, international team of senior scientists and students to study the functional relationships of these linked Paleoindian sites at the coast and highlands dating between 13,000 and 12,000 years ago. The project includes archaeological exploration of remote desert areas between the coast and highlands to discover additional sites in the settlement system, excavations, and analyses of materials from the sites using cutting-edge techniques. By determining the age and season of occupation of each site in the settlement system, and by teasing out behavioral indicators from the material remains from each site, the team will learn whether the coast or highlands were settled first, whether there were one or multiple groups, and more generally how humans have adapted to live in some of Earth’s most challenging environments.

To learn more about Dr. Rademaker’s research, visit his working group’s website: www.paleoandes.com

The Department of Anthropology congratulates Dr. Terrance Martin for his Distinguished Career Award from the Midwest Archaeological Conference. Dr. Martin joined the MSU Department of Anthropology as an Adjunct Professor in 2016 shortly after his retirement from the Illinois Sate Museum, where he had been a Curator for 31 years. He completed his PhD in archaeology from Michigan State University in 1986.

Dr. Martin has significantly contributed to the advancement of Midwestern Archaeology. In addition to his excellent contributions to archaeology and zooarchaeology during his tenure as a Research Associate, Curator, and Chair of the Illinois State Museum’s Anthropology Department, he has also mentored graduate students and worked alongside numerous archaeological colleagues, participating in excavations and analyzing faunal remains from across Midwestern North America and beyond.

Dr. Martin’s zooarchaeological research is well known and respected at an international level. His research of prehistoric and historic American Indian, French Colonial, European American, African American, and multi-racial sites in the Midwestern United States has contributed to the understanding of variation in foodways within and among sites and regions, use of animals for raw materials, ritual and special importance of animals such as black bears and sturgeon, reliance on domestic and wild animals, distribution of bison, and early domestication of dogs.

Dr. Martin has worked closely with archaeological colleagues from across the Midwestern United States, often participating in the excavations. Many of the projects that he has contributed to incorporated students and interns and provided excellent hands-on learning experiences. Besides his work as a mentor, Dr. Martin is fondly known as one of the ‘go-to’ zooarchaeologists for faunal analysis throughout the Midwestern United States. Since his retirement from the Illinois State Museum, he has continued to analyze faunal material for archaeological research projects.

The Department of Anthropology is proud to announce that PhD student Jeffrey Painter won the graduate student paper competition at the Midwest Archaeology Conference for his paper, entitled “Cooking Up a Common Ground: Vessel Use and Social Interactions at Morton Village”. Read the abstract to his paper below.

“In recent years, research on cooking has become increasingly important for understanding the past, as it can inform us about many sociocultural issues of interest to archaeologists. Despite this growth, analyses of ceramic use-alteration, damage that is the direct result of cooking and vessel use, have been applied infrequently to these larger topics. In this paper, I conduct a use-alteration analysis of pottery from Morton Village, a multi-cultural occupation site located in the central Illinois River valley, in order to gather information about social interactions and community building. When these use-alteration patterns are compared against two related sites, the results indicate that some vessel use traditions were maintained while others were altered or invented, suggesting that food, cooking, and food presentation played critical roles in the negotiation of community life at Morton Village.”

The Department of Anthropology congratulates alumna Dr. Susan Kooiman for receiving the Midwest Archaeology Conference Dissertation Award for her research entitled, “A Multiproxy Analysis of Culinary, Technological, & Environmental Interactions in the Northern Great Lakes Region”. Dr. Kooiman received her PhD at Michigan State University in 2018 and is now an Assistant Professor with the Department of Anthropology at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Read the abstract to Dr. Kooiman’s dissertation below.

“A novel combination of analytic methods is used to address the decades-long debate about diachronic subsistence, settlement, and social pattern changes during the Woodland period (AD 1 – 1600) in the northern Great Lakes of North America. While some have argued for dietary continuity throughout the regional Woodland, others maintain that certain specific resources—including fish, wild starchy plants, and/or maize—were more intensively exploited over time in reaction to various technological, social, and/or environmental factors. The Cloudman site (20CH6), located on Drummond Island off Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in Lake Huron, is a multicomponent habitation site with two millennia of Middle Woodland, early Late Woodland, and late Late Woodland occupations, as well as a late precontact component characterized by Ontario Iroquois pottery. The ceramic assemblage is therefore ideal for diachronic assessment of alterations in diet and technology in the context of dynamic natural and social environments and is employed as a case study for the multiproxy approach.

Ceramic typological classification and AMS dating of pottery residues are used to reconstruct an occupational history of the Cloudman site by which change over time can be evaluated. Functional pottery analysis of technical properties and use-alteration traces reveals that ceramic technology and cooking techniques evolved to facilitate new subsistence and processing needs. Absorbed lipid residue analysis, and microbotanical and stable isotope analysis of adhered carbonized food residue are used in tandem to construct a chronological sequence of culinary practices, which are characterized by both continuity of certain subsistence traditions, such as acorn and aquatic resource consumption, and transformative food choice in response to social and environmental change, including variable exploitation of maize and wild rice.

The diversity of the information captured and produced by each method highlights the importance of multiproxy dietary analyses in foodways studies for improving interpretive outcomes. Cooking and pottery technology lend further insight into adaptive decision-making and cultural tradition, and interpretations of past cuisine are further supported and enhanced through comparisons with ethnographic and ethnohistoric accounts of local indigenous cooking and diet. The rich data resulting from the complementary nature of these diverse methods demonstrates a complex interplay of technology, environment, and culturally-based decisions, and underscores the potential applications of such an analytic suite to long-standing problems in the northern Great Lakes and other archaeological contexts worldwide.”

The Department of Anthropology is proud to announce that PhD student Brian Geyer has received a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA) award for his research on technology professionals in Nairobi and Kisumu, Kenya. His research project, entitled “Intersectional Identity Among Kenya’s Technology Industry Professionals.”

His research will investigate how aspects of tech sector professionals’ identities, including gender but also ethnicity, religion, or socioeconomic status, affect their positions of social, political, and economic power in the sector. International development literature frequently discusses the importance of women’s empowerment as a means of lifting a population overall, especially within the most economically-productive sectors of a country’s economy. Additionally, international venture capitalist interest in the sector has increased significantly, which has in-turn boosted interest in the sector as a potential area for development. The research builds upon existing anthropological literatures that engage with the concepts science, technology, and society; identity production; and intersectionality and to critically contribute to development literature regarding women empowerment.

You can follow his project through his online open field journal: No Mud Huts. https://nomudhuts.matrix.msu.edu/

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, which was established in 2018 and currently supports four distinguished research associates. 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 is an indigenous and environmental archaeologist whose research investigates the ancient fisheries of the central California coast in collaboration with the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band and California State Parks. Through eco-archaeological analyses of animal remains from archaeological sites, Dr. Sanchez and his collaborators produce data relevant to contemporary fisheries management and information pertinent to the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band which informs cultural revitalization and stewardship.

Kelly Kamnikar, Department of Anthropology PhD student, recently published with colleagues in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology on their research from the site of Holliston Mills, Tennessee. The article discusses the bioarchaeology of chronic infection and health-related caregiving during the late Mississippian period at Holliston Mills.

Read the full article at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/oa.2805

Department of Anthropology Associate Professor Mara Leichtman  recently published in a new article in The Conversation in which she explores the history behind and reasons for Senegal’s political stability compared to many other West African nations.

Read the full article at https://theconversation.com/the-exception-behind-senegals-history-of-stability-113198