This year the program awarded approximately 70 predoctoral fellowships in a national competition administered by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on behalf of the Ford Foundation. The awards are made to individuals who, in the judgment of the review panels, have demonstrated superior academic achievement, are committed to a career in teaching and research at the college or university level, show promise of future achievement as scholars and teachers, and are well prepared to use diversity as a resource for enriching the education of all students.
Jordi’s research focuses on the bioarchaeology of ancient maritime communities in the Moche Valley, North Coast of Peru. Through skeletal analysis, her project seeks to reconstruct the paleodemography and health status of individuals excavated at the Jose Olaya site in Huanchaco (15 km north of modern-day Trujillo). Furthermore, she seeks to investigate the role of migration, maritime resource exploitation, development of social stratification, and gendered labor divisions ca. 400 BC-200 AD in the locality. This project is deeply tied to local communities, where she will continue mentorship of Peruvian archaeology students at the Universidad Nacional de Trujillo and local Huanchaco students.
The Department of Anthropology is extremely happy to announce that Dr. Lynne Goldstein (Professor Emerita of Anthropology and Founding Director of the Campus Archaeology Program) has received the Society for American Archaeology Lifetime Achievement Award. The prestigious award is in recognition of her pivotal theoretical and empirical contributions to the field, in the areas of mortuary archaeology, Midwestern prehistory, historical archaeology, archaeological ethics and repatriation, and public engagement, as well as professional and institutional leadership.
Lynne Goldstein earned her BA degree in Anthropology from Beloit College in 1971 and
her MA and PhD from Northwestern University (in 1973 and 1976, respectively). Her
commitment to archaeology began even earlier, in her high school days through
volunteer work at the Field Museum of Natural History and participation in the
Kampsville Project. Over the course of her career, she taught at the University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee (1976-1996) and Michigan State University (1996-2018), and
also chaired both departments. She retired from MSU in August 2018 and now holds
emerita status. A letter detailing all of Professor Goldstein’s contributions to our
profession could easily fill many dozens of pages. Here, we attempt to more succinctly
summarize some of her key contributions in the areas of scholarship, mentorship, and
service, referring the committee to the attached letters of support and curriculum
vitae for additional information about specific aspects of her distinguished career.
Lynne Goldstein’s first scholarly publication on Midwestern archaeology appeared in 1971; in 2018 she published four scholarly articles. Over this 48 year period (and more than 65 publications and 200 conference papers), she has made fundamental theoretical and empirical contributions to our field, in the areas of mortuary archaeology, Midwestern prehistory, historical archaeology, archaeological ethics and repatriation, and public engagement. Her early work on Mississippian mortuary archaeology (the focus of her doctoral dissertation) remains foundational and widely cited. Notably, Lynne’s ongoing contributions to mortuary studies has moved this area of study well beyond its early focus on reconstructing prehistoric social organization to more nuanced understandings of identity and variability in mortuary practices in the past. Throughout her career Dr. Goldstein’s research has focused on the Late Woodland and Mississippian periods of the Midwest U.S. where she conducted important and scientifically rigorous fieldwork in Illinois and southeastern Wisconsin, particularly at the site of Aztalan and its surrounding region. Her important contributions on these topics are themselves worthy of SAA recognition. However, one of the additional hallmarks of Goldstein’s career that we wish to highlight here has been her intellectual curiosity and enthusiasm about taking on new projects and exploring a range of different research questions. This curiosity led her to a multi-year project at the Russian cemetery at Fort Ross, California, and to the Tucson Basin, where she was part of large inter-disciplinary team documenting the historic Tucson Cemetery. Publications from these projects have made important intellectual contributions; Goldstein’s leadership of them (and impressive record of external funding) also attests to her remarkable organizational skills, field expertise, and ability to marshal and collaborate in large interdisciplinary research teams.
Lynne Goldstein’s intellectual curiosity and enthusiasm, coupled with her advocacy for public engagement with archaeology and her passion for communicating archaeological knowledge to diverse audiences, have also driven her involvement in an array of other projects. She served on the steering committee that established the Florida Public Archaeology Network, and then served on their board of directors for 12 years. At Michigan State, she developed and led the University’s innovative Campus Archaeology Project, persuading University leaders and grounds people alike that documenting the campus’s history through archaeological investigation was a valuable and significant undertaking. As Lynne has frequently advised us and her students, one should never undertake research without clear research questions, and in addition to providing countless students with field training and community engagement opportunities (as well as financial support), her work on the MSU campus has contributed significantly to the study of 19th and 20th century midwestern US history and the growth and significance of US land grant universities. An early and enthusiastic adopter of new technologies, she also has played a critical role in the expansion of digital humanities initiatives in archaeology. Recent work in this area include co-development of the MSU.seum mobile app to communicate aspects of MSU heritage across campus and co-directing of the “Institute on Digital Archaeology Method & Practice,” with Ethan Watrall (2014-2017).
Her undergraduate and graduate teaching (including many years of offering field schools) have been acknowledged by multiple awards; she has chaired 18 dissertation committees, served on dozens more, and mentored even more graduate (and undergraduate) students in programs around the US, in the United Kingdom, and beyond. She is a generous teacher and mentor, with an uncanny ability to cut through academic jargon and pomposity to help her students identify big questions and address them rigorously and clearly. Beyond her own students, she has mentored hundreds of other young anthropologists through her “standing room only” annual workshop at the AAA meetings on academic careers, which she offered for 17 consecutive years. As an academic administrator and mentor, she has brought the same clear-sightedness, straightforwardness, keen humor and sense of the absurd, and strategic thinking to her own leadership roles and to the guidance she provides others.
Her service to the SAA has been recognized by five Presidential Recognition Awards, spanning from 1991 to 2017. Her service on the SAA Task Force on Repatriation from 1990-2000 (and as an advisor from 2000-2010) made important contributions to the form and implementation of NAGPRA legislation (she also served on the Smithsonian Repatriation Committee for many years). Lynne also served as Secretary of the SAA (1988-1991), editor of American Antiquity (1996-2000), as co-Chair with Barbara Mills of the Task Force on Gender and Research Grants Submission (2013-2019), and currently chairs the SAA Publication Committee (2018-2021). She was similarly active in the American Anthropological Association, where she served as Publication Director for the Archaeology Section (2013-2017), Liaison to the Register of Professional Archaeologists (2016- 2018), and on several additional committees. And this does not even touch upon her leadership in the Midwest Archaeological Conference, Wisconsin Archaeological Survey, Florida Public Archaeology Network, American Association for the Advancement of Science, among other national and regional organizations.
The Society for American Archaeology will honor Lynne at the Annual Business Meeting and Awards Presentation on April 12, 5:00 to 6:30 pm, in the ACC Kiva Auditorium at the 2019 Annual Meeting in Albuquerque.
The Department of Anthropology is pleased to open the call for submissions to the 2019 Annual Anthropology Fieldwork Photo Contest.
This contest is open to MSU Department of Anthropology graduate students, undergraduates, alumni and faculty. Entries must be the original work of the entrant. We will accept photographs from the last five calendar years (taken in 2014 or later).
Help the department spread the message about who we are and what we do by sharing your experiences through photographic images!
Submissions are due by March 11, 2019.
For more information, check out the contest submission form.
MSU researcher Monir Moniruzzaman visits a slum of Dhaka, Bangladesh.
As previously reported here, Dr. Monir Moniruzzaman, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Michigan State University has been appointed as a member of the inaugural Task Force on Donation and Transplantation of Human Organs and Tissues at the World Health Organization (WHO). This Task Force was established by the Member States at the 70th World Health Assembly in 2017 to advise and assist the WHO and other Member States, in disseminating and implementing the WHO Guiding Principles. These guiding principles address the ethical aspects of organ transplantation such as the voluntary and unpaid donation of human tissues and organs, issues of universal access to transplant services, and the availability, safety and quality of these procedures worldwide.
The Task Force on Donation and Transplantation of Human Organs and Tissues also assists Member States in establishing and/or strengthening their systems in organ-tissue donation and transplantation at a national level or through regional cooperation. This Task Force, the first of its kind, is comprised of 31 selected experts, who have extensive knowledge on this issue across various fields such as medicine, surgery, ethics, law, patients’ rights, public administration and health systems and who come from regions across the world. We are grateful to Dr. Monir for his dedication and work on such an important topic.
Dr. Amanda Tickner at Keukenhof Gardens, Netherlands
Dr. Amanda Tickner is a librarian specializing in GIS in the Maps Library and an Adjunct lecturer in the Department of Anthropology. Amanda helps people find data, use GIS in research, teach GIS to beginners, and troubleshoot GIS problems, she also sits on several PhD committees in Anthropology. The interdisciplinary quality of her GIS work allows her to help people from all disciplines, which dovetails well with her anthropological background. Dr. Tickner received her PhD in archaeological paleobotany from the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill in 2009 and began at MSU in 2015.
Currently, Dr. Tickner is transitioning from using her
anthropology background as a paleobotanist to working with more cultural
subjects. She is very interested in using ethnographic methods in usability
studies via contextual analysis, which she can do as a part of her job as a GIS
librarian. Amanda is also interested in landscapes more generally – especially
people’s perceptions of virtual spaces in relation to physical spaces. Regrettably,
she has not been able to do much of her own research since switching career
paths because her library work takes up most of her time.
Dr. Tickner enjoys her current positions because librarians
are helpers and her adjunct position with anthropology allows her the ability
to share cultural references with people who speak her own language. It also
allows her to help students in a variety of ways. Amanda finds it satisfying to
help people succeed in their projects and to gain job skills because she can
teach interested people new skills without the pressure of giving grades,
something she feels is a wonderful change. Dr. Tickner’s current work builds
upon her previous experiences because her background in both ecology and social
science allows her to work with a wide variety of disciplinary problems in a
coherent and helpful way. This is important because it allows her to help
people with GIS research from all departments, from English to Forestry.
Dr. Amanda Tickner at Uxeau France
Her first interest in anthropology came from a fascinating
World Archeology course from Prof. Peter Wells at University of Minnesota,
where she studied for her undergraduate. While this course was initially
selected to fulfill a requirement, Dr. Tickner soon realized she really enjoyed
this subject the most. Grinning while studying for World Archaeology became a
norm. This enjoyment led her to value a holistic approach in her thinking and
understanding which anthropology also values. Amanda’s interest in both the
sciences and the humanities kept her firmly in archeology, since it is a
wonderful hybrid of these things.
When Dr. Tickner was starting out, and in her past
anthropology teaching (historical ecology, food and culture, and four fields
anthropology), she was very interested in getting students to break down their
ideas of a nature/culture dichotomy and recognize that humans are as natural as
anything else in the world, while at the same time acknowledging our role in
shaping our natural world. This is a value she hopes she has imparted in her
students. Now, Dr. Tickner enjoys hearing from students that her assistance
helped them finish their master’s thesis or that skills she taught them in a
workshop helped get them a job. Currently, she is excited about the new digital
scholarship lab in the library as she has had a lot of fun working with the 360
immersive display space and looks forward to helping more classes use it.
We are extremely happy to have Dr. Tickner here at MSU and are glad that she decided to move across the country even though Michigan winters are not her favorite thing. Having grown up in Minnesota, Amanda thought maybe she would be able to handle winter better now that she is older, but so far, she reports this is not the case.
Dr. Heather Howard, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Affiliated Faculty of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies program and the Native American Institute here at MSU, was awarded a grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada as co-Principal Investigator with Principal Investigator Heidi Bohaker (History, University of Toronto) and co-Principal Investigator Margaret Bruchac (Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania).
Their project, “Widening the Circle: Building a Community Knowledge Sharing Digital Platform with Great Lakes Indigenous Cultural Heritage Research Data,” will provide just over $40,000.00 to create and test a new public website for the Great Lakes Research Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal Arts and Cultures (GRASAC). GRASAC is an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural alliance of researchers from Indigenous communities, universities, museums, and archives who share the common goal of creating deeper understandings of Great Lakes Indigenous arts, languages, identities, territoriality, and governance. GRASAC houses over five thousand detailed records of Great Lakes material culture and documentary art, thirty thousand high resolution digital photographs, audio and video recordings, as well as language resources including glossaries of Cayuga and Anishinaabemowin.
This project will ensure responsible data sharing grounded in respectful and meaningful Nation-to-Nation conversations helping to develop long-term data governance policies for GRASAC. Using Mukurtu, an open source software developed specifically for Indigenous cultural heritage, we will work with community partners to develop appropriate cultural protocols to protect data and to test the usability of the platform by Indigenous community members, including contemporary makers, teachers, and students. This project builds on work Dr. Howard has been undertaking with Michigan Indigenous makers and the collections of the MSU Museum over the last three years.
Dr. Megan McCullen at Chaco Canyon World Heritage Site
We are very proud to announce that our alumna, Dr. Megan McCullen, is the new Director of the Gordon L. Grosscup Museum of Anthropology & Planetarium at Wayne State University. Dr. McCullen’s position was created as a full-time position in 2017 by the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at Wayne State. Prior to this, a faculty member in the Anthropology Department was the Museum Director in addition to their regular faculty duties, and the Planetarium had a similar set up within the Physics Department. The goal of creating a new position was to have a person who can take the lead on managing the unique resources of the college that are used not only by students, but also by the community.
As
Director of the Anthropology Museum and Planetarium, Dr. McCullen fills many
rolls as each have distinct missions. Officially, she works for the Dean’s
Office, so part of her role as Director is to conceptualize how the public
community sees and uses college resources – as well as how the university and
departmental communities use these same resources. Her day to day job includes
grant writing, working with the college’s advancement team, marketing,
developing exhibitions and programming, creating, and maintaining community
partnerships, curating the museum’s collection, and supervising student
projects in the museum. She also oversees the student employees, who are the
only other staff of the museum.
The
driving factor of Dr. McCullen’s work is her interest in making the resources
of the University more accessible to the community surrounding them. One of her
goals is to increase the number of community members coming to campus to visit the
Museum and Planetarium, and to bring these resources out into the community as
well. Megan has been working to fund programs to reduce barriers to access of
the museum. She became interested in this when she began volunteering in
museums as an undergraduate and has continued to work in museums and outreach
since that time. Her experience curating, cataloging, and researching museum
collections in graduate school here at MSU prepared her for her current
collections management efforts.
Dr. McCullen’s favorite thing about her
job is that she enjoys working with the public and developing new ways to
engage communities both on and off campus. The Director position also requires her
to learn many new things, like astronomy and the history of her new museum. As
an academic these learning opportunities are welcome. Megan also enjoys being
in a position to think holistically and broadly about future projects. Part of her
role is to think about what they want to be doing five or ten years down the
road, what they need to do to get there, and how to collaborate with other
sectors of the College and the community to do so. This includes everything
from exhibitions to curation plans. She has always been one for thinking about
connections and relationships, so she truly enjoys being in a position where
building and maintaining these kinds of relationships is an important part of her
work.
Megan’s
interest in archaeology started in a course in Egyptology. As the class studied
pre-dynastic Egypt and she learned about the stone tools ancient peoples made,
she became fascinated with how archaeologists decode material culture to
understand how past societies lived. This led her to graduate school and she
earned her Ph.D. from our department in 2015. Dr. McCullen says that MSU prepared
her for her current career connecting her with a job at a cultural center
during her first year. Her advisor, Dr. O’Gorman, was on the center’s board and
informed her about the job opening which gave her experience in K-12 education
and outreach, community partnerships, grant writing and small-scale exhibit
development. Her advisor also allowed her to participate in a funded project to
re-evaluate a large museum collection, which led to her dissertation project
and further research using museum collections. All these wonderful experiences
within our department and at MSU offered her the preparation needed for her
current Director position.
Dr. McCullen still keeps in touch with her
MSU mentors. Last fall, Dr. John Norder rescued her when her car broke down on
the highway outside Lansing. “You can’t ask for that kind of help if you don’t
keep in touch,” she says. She has called her dissertation co-chairs (O’Gorman
and Norder) several times during her first year at my current position seeking
advice, and to discuss shared research interests.
Currently, the Gordon L. Grosscup Museum of Anthropology at Wayne State University just opened an exhibit entitled The Secret Life of Things: Sixty Years of Museum Anthropology at Wayne State, which highlights sixty objects from their collections that reflect the breadth and depth of their work. Dr. McCullen invites everyone to come by, say hello and explore their free museum.
Dr. Joseph T. Hefner, Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Michigan State University, and Dr. Nicholas Herrmann, Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Texas State University, received a National Institute of Justice award to improve the accuracy of age estimates for unidentified remains of children and adolescents. The University of Texas Health Science Center San Antonio and Triservice Orthodontic Residency Program, 59th Dental Group will also collaborate on this research.
The project entitled, “Investigation of subadult dental age-at-death estimation using transitional analysis and machine learning methods,” was funded for approximately $900,000 and focuses on tooth root and crown development to estimate age in children and adolescents using transition analysis and machine learning methods. Currently, standard methods often underestimate the age of children and adolescents by one to more than two years as age increases.
Their goal is to provide
forensic anthropologists and odontologists an accurate and precise age
estimation method using a large, demographically diverse, modern sample of
children and adolescents by collecting data from radiographs obtained from
living children and adolescents from different populations in the United
States, the United Kingdom, South Africa and other locations around the world.
Dr. Hefner states, “as forensic anthropologists, we are routinely involved in the identification effort when unidentified human remains are discovered. Refined age estimates are a critical component of identification, especially when the skeletal remains under examination belong to a child.”
Jeff Painter collecting pottery metrics in the MSU archaeology lab
The Alumni and Friends of Archaeology Expendable Fund, established to enhance research and learning of undergraduate and graduate students in the archaeology program through the MSU Department of Anthropology, awarded Jeff Painter funds for his dissertation research during the Summer of 2018. This was the second year for the Alumni and Friends of Archaeology Research Enhancement Award and Jeff was able to complete two trips to the Dickson Mounds Museum in west-central Illinois in order to gather data for his dissertation.
Mr. Painter’s proposed dissertation seeks to better understand the role
of cooking and foodways within social interaction by examining vessel use-wear
and the distribution of vessels, cooking techniques, and cooking-related
features across the site of Morton Village in central Illinois, a site of known
prehistoric interaction between different cultural groups, the Larson site in
central Illinois and the Tremaine Complex in western Wisconsin. By using the
comparative sites, he hopes to document the traditions of cooking and foodways
a local Mississippian group and an Oneota group outside the area of
interaction.
The allocated funds helped Jeff to defray the cost of gas, food, and
necessary supplies to travel to The Dickson Mounds Museum (DMM), which houses
the Larson site materials. On Mr. Painter’s first trip to the museum, he
examined ceramics for use-wear and also collected morphological measurements. On
the subsequent trip, he collaborated with Alan Harn, the site director of the
1970 Larson excavations, and obtained digital copies of excavation maps from
the 1966 and 1970 excavations.
Jeff is still in the process of data collection and has yet to start analyzing this data. Mr. Painter wanted to stress that the support provided by the Alumni and Friends of Archaeology Research Enhancement Award has been essential in continuing work on his proposed dissertation research.
An international research crew, including MSU Department of Anthropology Assistant Professor Kurt Rademaker and five team members, contributed some of the key ancient human remains that documented population dynamics in the Andean region. The results of this research were revealed in a recent article, “Reconstructing the Deep Population History of Central and South America,” published in the journal Cell Vol.175(5).
In 2015, Dr. Rademaker’s team excavated several ancient individuals from Cuncaicha rockshelter, in the high-elevation Peruvian Andes. Dr. Rademaker hand-carried the three rare, ancient individuals which included a 9000-year-old female and two males dating from 4200 and 3300 years ago from Peru to labs in the Unites States and Germany for radiocarbon dating, CT scanning, stable isotope and paleogenetic analyses and then returned them to Peru. This work lead to the first high quality ancient DNA data from Central and South America, shedding light on a distinctive DNA type associated with the first widespread archaeological culture of North America, known as the Clovis culture.
This work has also been featured in the New York Times, “Crossing From Asia, the First Americans Rushed Into the Unknown”. Dr. Rademaker says, “As an archaeologist, it is incredibly rewarding to collaborate with physical anthropologists and paleogeneticists to unravel the complex story of early Americans. Interdisciplinary efforts like this are the future of our fields.”
