In May, 2015 the Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT) with its partners, the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa & Chippewa Indians, the Little River Band of Ottawa Indians, the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians, the Match-e-be-nash-she-wish Band of Pottawatomi, the Nottawaseppi Huron Band of the Potawatomi, the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe of Michigan, and Commonwealth Cultural Resources Group, Inc. received the Governor’s Award for Historic Preservation.  The State Historic Preservation Office at MSHDA initiated the award program in 2003 to recognize outstanding historic preservation achievements that reflect a commitment to the preservation of Michigan’s unique character and the many archaeological sites and historic structures that document Michigan’s past.

Led by MSU alumnus Dr. James Robertson of MDOT, the Governor’s Award recognized this group for 1) developing a comprehensive Tribal Involvement Plan for the data recovery excavations undertaken at two sites in advance of the construction of M-231 and 2) employing sophisticated and multi-disciplinary scientific methods that revealed two specialized archaeological sites that are the first of their kind in the prehistoric archaeological record along the Grand River in West Michigan.  MDOT recovered important information about Tribal people’s lives between 500 to 1,000 years ago, especially relating to the wild rice, lake sturgeon, and food storage/cache pits found at the sites. The project’s partners continue to work together to develop curriculum units and lesson plans for educators statewide that relate the archaeological finds with Tribal history, Tribal culture, and Tribal environmental stewardship.

The award-winning project involved four graduates of the MSU Department of Anthropology. Dr. Anderson (Ph.D. 1992) is the State Archaeologist who participated from a regulatory perspective and advised MDOT on the project. Margaret Barondess (M.A. 1990) is the Department of Transportation manager of the work area that implemented the project. Dr. Robertson (Ph.D. 1987) is the Department of Transportation staff archaeologist from MDOT who worked with the tribes, and Dr. Mike Hambacher (Ph.D. 1992) was the consultant contractor from Commonwealth Cultural Resources Group who performed the excavation.

Photograph: The four MSU Department of Anthropology Alumni in the Lansing, Michigan Capitol rotunda for the M-231 award ceremony. Left to Right:  Dr. Dean Anderson, Margaret Barondess, Dr. James Robertson, and Dr. Michael Hambacher.

William Lovis, with colleagues Alan Arbogast (MSU Geography), and G. William Monaghan (Indiana U/Indiana Geological Survey) have been awarded a $40,996 grant titled Synthesis of Landscape Evolution, Human Use, and Management of Site 20LU115, Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, Michigan.  This research team brings the perspectives of environmental archaeology, dune geomorphology, and glacial landscape evolution to bear on a common problem. The grant, from the Midwest Archaeological Center, U.S. National Park Service, and the Cooperative Ecosystem Study Unit (CESU) is already in force and will run through early 2017.  The award will fund multidisciplinary research synthesizing information from remote sensing, advanced dating methods, and environmental evolutionary landscape reconstruction into a heritage management framework for a Wilderness Area archaeological site potentially endangered by contemporary climate change.

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Hefner has received a grant in the amount of $423,959 from the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) to fund the project A Macromorphoscopic Databank: Establishing the Statistical Analysis of Macromorphoscopic Data in Forensic Anthropology. The two-year research project will address a methodological gap in forensic anthropology by providing reference data and establishing analytical methods to accurately and objectively assess ancestry. Dr. Hefner will be gathering data on macromorphoscopic traits (slight variation in cranial form) in order to correlate patterns in the frequency distribution of traits to forensically-significant populations.  His goal is to establish a large, geographically-diverse reference database and then develop a computer program utilizing standard and novel statistical classification methods so that practitioners can assess ancestry from macromorphoscopic traits.

This article is in the Department of Anthropology’s Fall 2015 Newsletter, see the entire newsletter here.

This fall marks the one-year anniversary of LEADR (the Lab for the Education and Advancement in Digital Research), a new joint initiative among Anthropology, History, and MATRIX Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences. LEADR functions an interdisciplinary classroom, digital resource library, and a pedagogical and methodological support center located in 112 Old Horticulture. LEADR was initially funded by the Office of the Provost as part of an effort to create robust technology environments for teaching and learning at MSU.

The Lab is staffed by three graduate assistants, including Brian Geyer from Anthropology, and is under the direction of Brandon Locke, a digital humanities specialist from History. This semester alone, staff are working with 22 different courses in History and Anthropology on class assignments that range from blogging to text analysis of web sources. Projects from last year include an interactive map of archaeological sites in Egypt, created by students of ANP 455. Students learned basic HTML coding and incorporated web links into their essays for online publication. The entire project was hosted on GitHub (a social code-sharing platform), allowing both code and content to be shared with the public when students desired it. LEADR also assists Anthropology majors in developing an online portfolio as part of their capstone class, ANP 489.

LEADR is a teaching space, but also a space for research innovation. The Campus Archaeology field school worked with LEADR this past summer to create visualizations for the metadata collected over the years. Graduate students in Anthropology are using the Lab to contribute to their dissertation research. Adrianne Daggett and Blair Zaid have each used the 3D scanning technologies at the Lab to scan and print artifacts. The Lab hosts Nvivo for qualitative analysis, as well as transcription pedals and software. A wide range of equipment is available to be checked out, from tablets to cameras to audio recording equipment. One of the purposes of the Lab is to promote ‘scholarly play’ and experimentation, adding a range of skills to anthropology degrees.

Instructors hoping to integrate digital technology into their teaching methods can find support at LEADR for both undergraduate and graduate courses alike. Staff are available to help design assignments that achieve the learning outcomes instructors desire. The Lab’s pedagogical approach emphasizes new literacies: digital literacy (the ability to use technologies to find, understand, evaluate, create, and communicate information) and data literacy (becoming critical consumers and producers of data and the arguments made with it, within the discipline as well as in the news and politics). Students achieve these literacies while acquiring skills in coding, web writing and design, and multimedia data collection and dissemination techniques. The result is an increased capacity to make meaningful contributions to digital scholarship. In the future, Brandon would like to see more immersive projects for students, such as exhibition development. Brandon recommends that interested instructors meet with staff prior to the start of the semester for optimal course planning.

Images: Brian Geyer instructing students (above); Digital technology allows artifacts to be scanned and printed in 3D (below)