Published: July 28, 2016

Late-Breaking News: This summer an interdisciplinary team of specialists (James Cordova, Michelle Goman, Mary Pye),  under the umbrella of CU Boulder, recorded and explored a group of unreported caves in the upper basin of the Balsas River, Guerrero, Mexico. Most of them demonstrate an extraordinary history of human occupation. The Cave of the Governors of Techan, a shallow cave that was carved  to create a monolithic sanctuary with four were-jaguars in high relief displaying  Olmec style iconography (circa 1000-600 B.C.). This is the first cave with Olmec style monumental sculpture located in Guerrero, the cradle of the earliest maize in the American continent. 

Gerardo Gutierrez was awarded a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies to pursue his Aztec ethnohistorical research while on sabbatical leave. The ACLS fellowship is one of the most competitive and prestigious awards in the field of humanities. Over the summer, he has been training students to use LiDAR (light detection and ranging unit) technology in archaeology fieldwork:

Chimney Rock Time Machine

I have just returned from fieldwork at Chimney Rock as part of the Grand Challenge initiative.  We had excellent coverage from the press and I would like to share some of the early results of Project Map. Five undergraduate and graduate students have been trained in the use of Lidar technology, and we have also had the collaboration of an international scholar. I am looking forward to applying the Lidar technology in projects abroad in Latin America and Africa. —Gerardo Gutiérrez

Televised broadcast from Durango

Also on YouTube

Using a LiDar model created by Gutiérrez and grad students Tessa Branyan and Mariana Sanders, photographer Shaun Stanley compiled a video tour of the project for an article in the Durango Herald

See also their LiDAR images from Ft. Vasquez on the 9news site


Publications 

See this new menu item under News & Events


Promotions 

Donna M. Goldstein—Professor

Gerardo Gutiérrez—Associate Professor with tenure

Robin Bernstein—Associate Professor with tenure

Jen Shannon—Associate Professor with tenure


In Memoriam

We mourn the loss of our beloved colleague, Jim Hester, in January.


Allison Formanack is the ‘Margaret Mead of Mobile Homes’, according to the Lincoln Journal Star


Payson Sheets won a major NSF grant for his project at El Cerén, with Christine Dixon (PhD ’13) as Co-PI. “Constructing a Maya Community by Public Works Projects: Cerén, El Salvadorexplores communal level village activities that apparently were accomplished in the absence of elite control. Of particular interest are the sacbé, or “white roadways”. Learn more about this “Pompeii of the New World”. Due to violent gang warfare near El Cerén, however, Sheets is pursuing parallel research in Costa Rica for the interim. Find details is Dispatches from the Field.


Jenny Washabaugh (MA student) won an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship for outstanding graduate students pursuing STEM research-based graduate degrees at accredited US institutions. Hers was one of 2,000 award offers among nearly 17,000 applications. Her advisor is Robin Bernstein. Another of Bernstein’s advisees, Katie McGuire, won honorable mention.


Gregg Ortiz also received a $20,000 Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant from the NSF, Cultural Anthropology program, for his project “Uneven Development and Environmental Subjectivities in the Eagle Ford Shale, South Texas” (Jerry Jacka PI). Honorable mention for the grant went to MA student Kaitlyn Davis.


Meryleen Mena (PhD candidate) was selected for CU’s inaugural Jean Bovard Graduate Fellowship in the Social Sciences for scholarly achievement in the areas of international and cross-cultural understanding. Mena has focused her research on Brazil, particularly looking at the effects of political violence on people who did not support the military regimes of 1964-1985 and the political, economic and social repercussions of this violent legacy on contemporary Brazil. Mena was also named by the Graduate School for a Ruth Landes Memorial Research Award (the Reed Foundation) and a Dissertation Completion Award with a semester of full support at CU.


Making Archaeology Public…and Collaborative

Scott Ortman participated in a video project to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the National Historic Preservation Act. All of the archaeological work that is carried out to meet the requirements of the NHPA creates a vast reservoir of understanding about life in the past and yields a wealth of amazing stories about our American experience. The videos on this website have been created by volunteer groups of archaeologists from across the country in order to share some of these stories with you.


Ortman conducted this year’s undergraduate field school in the Southwest, with graduate student assistants Patrick Cruz—exploring his Tewa origins—Kaitlyn Davis, and Samantha Linford. Reflecting Ortman’s collaborative philosophy, Pojoaque Pueblo high school students joined the field crew and worked with community members through a culture camp funded in part by The Office for Outreach and Engagement. Full story here

Ortman also coached eleven volunteers in Hale’s CU Ceramics Lab every week last Spring, as reported in the Indian Peaks Chapter of the Colorado Archaeological Society newsletter.


Arthur Joyce co-directed the Nochixtlán Preceramic Project in December and January.  The project excavated one of the earliest sites ever discovered in Mexico dating to the early Paleoindian period.  The site was located at the base of an incised stream 13 meters below the modern ground surface.  Approximately 300 stone artifacts were recovered.


The Department of Anthropology hosted the ninth North American Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG) Conference from April 22-24, 2016.  The theme of the conference was “Bolder Theory: time, matter, ontology and the archaeological difference.”  The TAG conference brought an international group of scholars, faculty and graduate students to campus with over 120 participants.  The plenary session featured talks by Rosemary Joyce, Timothy Pauketat, Christopher Witmore, and María Nieves Zedeno, which was followed by a discussion with the audience moderated by Benjamin Alberti.   Sessions included topics such as “Ruins, Rubbish, Recycling, and Wrecks: Theorizing Things Left Behind” (Organized by Anthropology alum Stacy Barber), “Deep Histories of the Image in the American Southwest,” and “How Things Act: An Archaeology of Materials in Political Life.”  Faculty were well represented with papers given by Cathy Cameron, Arthur Joyce, Sarah Kurnick, Steve Lekson, and Scott Ortman as well as by recent alum Guy Hepp.  A session was also organized by Pascale Meehan with papers by Anthropology graduate students Erin Baxter, Bailey Duhé, Rachel Egan, Lindsay Johansson, and Pascale Meehan.  The TAG was organized by Timothy Webmoor and Arthur Joyce with support from the Departments of Anthropology and Classics, the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History, and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research.


Inga Calvin, Lecturer for the Department and the Sewall Residential Academic Program, was honored recently with a Marinus Smith Recognition Award. These awards are presented each spring to select CU-Boulder teachers, advisors and staff who made a significant, positive impact on the lives of CU-Boulder students.


Rachel Egan (PhD student) is now an editorial assistant/proofreader for the open access journal Arqueologia Iberoamericana.


Kelly Anne Graves was recently named recipient of a $4,000 Sheryl R. Young Memorial Scholarship from CU in support of a graduate student in the sciences. Graves is studying medical anthropology.


Jessica D. Hedgepeth Balkin is this year’s recipient of the Earl Morris Award in Archaeology, as the department’s most outstanding graduate student in that field. The award comes with a plaque and a $1,000 scholarship.


Marnie Thomson was selected by the CU Grad School for a 2016 Graduate Summer Fellowship in the amount of $6,000 to support completion of her doctoral dissertation on Stories of Darkness: Humanitarian Governance, Congolese Refugees, and a Neglected Conflict.


Congratulations to winners of this year’s $1,000 Beverly Sears Grant from the CU Grad School:

Katie McGuire, Lindsay Johansson, Jenny Washabaugh, Dani Merriman, Emily Hite,

Meryleen Mena, Amir Abbas, Tessa Branyan, Hannah Selvey, and Gregg Ortiz.


2016 Goldstein Altman Graduate Student Research Awards

  • Page McClean is currently in Chilean Patagonia conducting initial research on the Carretera Austral, a national highway first built under the Pinochet dictatorship. “I used part of the funds to begin archival research at the Archivo Nacional de Chile and the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos in Santiago.  Now I am conducting preliminary field research, trying out different potential field sites and fine-tuning my project which so far has involved bus, truck, and car drivers, gas station operators, people who lived in the area before the road was built, construction workers, and many recent migrants to the area.  The aim is to construct a social history of the road and to understand its continued impact on those living in the Aysén Region.”
  • Will Lammons is studying urban art in Oaxaca City, Mexico during the protest of Oaxaca's teacher's union, Sección 22 to understand how different types of urban art react to moments of protest and unrest and how they connect or refuse social movements. 
  • Arielle Milkman is studying politics of water urbanization in Lima, Peru. She is looking at connections between political violence, the legacies of Peru's civil war, and access to water in Peru's capital city.
  • Bailey Duhé is a second year MA student in cultural anthropology. Her award provides the means to spend her summer in Washington DC interviewing curators and collections staff at several museums that are dedicated to African American life, culture, and history. Duhé plans to use this preliminary research to guide her larger interests in museum representation and community engagement.

Fiske program weds ancient archaeology and astronomy with the latest technology

Steve Lekson and grad student, Patrick Cruz, were expert consultants for a planetarium program that is sure to dazzle Chaco lovers among the crowd here in Boulder and when it hits the road.