Kathryn Frederick is the recipient of an Honorable Mention in the 2015 Society for American Archaeology Student Paper competition for her presentation “Holes: The Beginners Guide to Food Caching”. Kate was/will be honored at the Annual Awards Ceremony in San Francisco. This is only the second Honorable Mention since the inception of the Student Paper competition, attesting to the strength of her research. “Holes . . .” reports on the results of three years of subterranean food caching experiments eventually resulting in five months of underground food storage that passed modern food safety standards. Kate’s work was assisted by collaboration with Professor Leslie Bourquin from the Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition. All food safety analyses were run at the MSU Diagnostic Center for Population and Animal Health with funding from an avocational donor. Two cycles of the experiments were conducted through a partnership with the City of Lansing Fenner Arboretum. Kate’s award winning research will form one component of her doctoral dissertation.
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MSU Anthropology Undergraduates at UURAF
The annual University Undergraduate Research and Arts Forum (UURAF) took place Friday, April 10, 2015 in the MSU Union. The Department of Anthropology was represented by five undergraduate students who presented their original research to the broader MSU community. All the undergraduates did an excellent job presenting their work. Presentations included:
Rebecca Albert: “Burnt to a Crisp- Using Charred Food Remains on pottery to Reconstruct the Plant Diet”
Allison Apland: “Pathways Between Food Insecurity and Serum Folate Status Through Coping Strategies: A Case Study Among Breastfeeding Women in Drought Stricken Northern Kenya”
Kyla Cools: “Patterns of Change”
Taylor Flaherty: “Determining Sex Using Discriminate Functioning of the Human Mandible”
Joshua Schnell: “Mississippian Landscapes: A Study of the Relationships Between Natural Landscapes and the Formation and Modification of Cultural Landscapes at Major Mississippian Sites, 800-1300 CE”
Joshua Schnell: “3D Skulls: A Comparative Study of 3D Model Generation Techniques and Their Relative Accuracy for Digital Cranial Osteometry”
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Lisa Bright awarded the College of Social Science Research Scholars Fellowship
We are happy to announce that PhD student Lisa Bright has been awarded the College of Social Science Research Scholars Fellowship for Summer 2015. This award, open only to students completing their first year of doctoral study, is awarded to students who demonstrate strong preparation and aspiration towards a career in social science research. Lisa will use the award to travel to San Jose, California and begin archival research on her dissertation site. The funds will also be used to purchase digital camera equipment to be used for digitizing historical documents at the archives.
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2015 Anthropology Photo Contest Winners
First Place: Sabrina Perlman, “Football in a Fishing Village”, Ghana 2014
Second Place: Edward Glazer, “All Weather Billiards in China”, Qinghai Province, China, 2011
Third Place: Sylvia Deskaj, “Mountains”, Albania, 2014
Honorable Mentions go to:
Ann Martinez, “Dia de Santiago”, Antigua, Guatemala, 2014
Katy Meyers Emery, “Mayan Flying Dancers”, Mexico, 2015
Thanks to all the participants, and congratulations to this year’s winners!
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MSU Anthropology Graduate Panel Podcast at SfAA and Kehli Henry wins Bea Medicine Scholarship
Congratulations to Kehli Henry on winning one of the two very competitive Bea Medicine Awards from the Society for Applied Anthropology. “The scholarship celebrates the life and legacy of Beatrice Medicine, an internationally prominent anthropologist who passed away in December 2005. Dr. Medicine was a descendant on both sides of her family from the Lakota, and an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. This heritage found reflection in her life’s work — an impressive record of teaching, research, and service, which focused on understanding and tolerance within the broader human condition and particularly toward Native peoples” (http://www.sfaa.net/about/prizes/student-awards/bea-medicine/)
Kehli will be presenting her paper “Engagement Between & Across: Working with an American Indian Community while Working through Academia” in a panel highlighting the work of the Anthropology Department’s doctoral students at the SfAA’s annual meeting in Pittsburgh in March. The panel, titled, “Researcher and Community Engagement: The Politics of Doing Research” is organized by Adam Haviland and Meenakshi Narayan and also includes papers by Ying-Jen Lin, Fredy Rodriguez-Mejia, and Marie Schaeffer.
The panel was selected by popular vote to be one of the twenty podcast “by the SfAA Podcast Project during the 75th Annual Society for Applied Anthropology conference, and will be made available free to the public online” (SfAAPodcasts.net). This panel will explore aspects of research that mediate researcher-community interactions with a focus on reflexively examining the roles of positionality, power, and subjectivity in our encounters with communities. Through consideration of issues including researcher positionality, community perceptions of research, and what researchers can really offer communities, this panel probes the politics of doing research. Drawing on experiences with communities in Taiwan, Honduras, India, and the United States, panel members will highlight parallels and divergences in the politics of doing research in their respective locations.
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Meenakshi Narayan receives College of Social Science Research Scholars Fellowship
The Department of Anthropology is very pleased to inform that Meenakshi Narayan, a third-year graduate student of the Department is a three-year College of Social Science Research Scholars Fellowship awardee (2013 – 2015). Through receiving this award, Meenakshi has successfully carried out two years of summer research in India, including her pre-dissertation research (2014) to facilitate her dissertation research. Meenakshi will use the award from this year to focus on language training at the South Asia Summer Language Institute (SASLI), Madison Wisconsin.
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Dr. Todd Fenton and Dr. Joseph Hefner Selected as Inaugural Members of a National Forensics Science Subcommittee
The first meeting of the OSAC Subcommittee on Anthropology took place in January 2015. Dr. Todd Fenton and Dr. Joseph Hefner were announced in October 2014 as two initial members of the National Institute of Justice and National Institute on Standards and Technology’s subcommittee on Anthropology. The Subcommittee on Anthropology is a subsection of Crime Scene/ Death Investigation and part of the new Organization of Scientific Area Committees (OSAC). This initiative replaces the Scientific Working Group in Anthropology (SWGANTH) established by the FBI and the National Institute of Justice but retains a similar mission: “The Subcommittee on Anthropology will focus on standards and guidelines related to application of anthropological methods and theory – particularly those relating to the recovery and analysis of human remains – to resolve legal matters” (http://www.nist.gov/forensics/osac/sub-anth.cfm). The OSAC was formed in February 2014 to support the development of standards and guidelines in American Forensic Science. Parts of this announcement were also featured on MSU Today in December.
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Watrall & Goldstein Receive Grant to Organize Institute on Digital Archaeology Method & Practice
The Department of Anthropology is very pleased to announce that, in collaboration with MATRIX: The Center for Digital Humanities & Social Sciences, Professors Watrall and Goldstein have received a $249,708 Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to organize the Institute on Digital Archaeology Method & Practice
Hosted jointly by MATRIX and the Department of Anthropology and directed by Watrall (Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology; Associate Director of MATRIX) and Lynne Goldstein (Professor, Department of Anthropology), the institute will bring together 20 participants to the campus of Michigan State University for two 6 day sessions in 2015 and 2016. The ultimate goal of the institute is to build capacity among private sector, public sector, student, and scholarly archaeologists – especially in areas that fall outside “traditional” digital archaeological practice. The institute also hopes to build the foundation for a networked and intellectually unified community of practice for digital archaeology
In order to accomplish the goals of the institute, attendance will be open to public sector archaeologists, private sector archaeologists, students, museum archaeologists, and scholarly archaeologists from both the anthropological and humanist archaeological communities. Sessions (both talks and workshops) will be delivered by a wide variety of internationally regarded experts from the world of classics and ancient history, archaeology (humanist and anthropological), the digital humanities, museums, and web mapping. The institute is organized along several themes: Field Methods, Data & Linked Data, Geospatial, Scholarly Publication & Communication, Public Outreach & Engagement, and Project Development & Management.
While the institute will include sessions on a wide variety of topics, its organizational focus is on a digital project which attendees will be challenged to envision, design, develop, and launch over the course of the institute, with the bulk of the work happening between the two week long meetings.
Header image CLE_1221 by Dr._Colleen_Morgan used under a CC BY 2.0 license
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Watrall receives NEH Grant for next phase of the Archaeological Resources Cataloging System (ARCS) Project
The Department of Anthropology is very pleased to announce that, in collaboration with the College of Arts and Letter and the Department of Art, Art History, and Design, and MATRIX: The Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences, Professor Ethan Watrall has received a $350,000 NEH Digital Implementation grant to continue the work on the Archaeological Resources Cataloging System (ARCS) project. The project will be co-directed by Jon Frey (Assistant Professor, Department of Art, Art History, and Design)
Originally funded by an NEH Digital Startup Grant and developed as a proof of concept by a small research group in the College of Arts and Letters (http://arcs.cal.msu.edu), ARCS is an open-source application designed to reintroduce many of the advantages of traditional archival research into its new electronic form. By means of an intuitive web-based interface, users can upload, visually scan, keyword, sort, and link together digitized copies of photographs, drawings, and (frequently handwritten) documents that together are the most faithful representation of the archaeological record. What is more, ARCS relies on a crowd-sourced approach to augment the information it contains. This not only provides a ready alternative to archaeological projects that lack a staff of dedicated archivists, but also encourages collaboration among scholars as well as public interest in a project’s ongoing research.
While the start-up phase of the project was very successful, the NEH Digital Implementation Grant will allow the project team to address several key software, design, and sustainability issues, including improved software architecture, interoperability, and community adoption and use.
As part of this new phase of the ARCS project, the project director’s have identified three archaeological projects that have already begun to digitize their primary documents and are interested in using the ARCS software in order to meet their research needs. Implementation at each of these projects will involve a further development of ARCS, which will in turn yield an even more flexible platform that can be customized to match each individual project’s unique system of archaeological documentation. Most importantly, because our implementation of the software involves multiple projects, we will be uniquely suited to develop a middle-ground solution that bridges the gap between the need to preserve the unique character of each project’s evidence and the larger goal of utilizing the evidence from several locations in research at a regional scale.
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Syazana Amirulmokminin Documentary to Appear in Michigan Film Festival
We are very happy to announce that a short documentary film by Syazana Amirulmokminin, an undergraduate student in the Department of Anthropology, has been accepted into the Made in Michigan Film Festival. Entitled The New Generation, the film dives lives of two young Asian-American women and the unique challenges they face living between two cultures. Amirulmokminin produced the film as part of ANP429: Ethnographic Field Methods, taught by Professor Mara Leichtman. The Made in Michigan Film festival takes place in Frankenmuth on Oct. 3rd and 4th.
