News Archive

Alumni Newsletter Archive

November 2015

  • Lessons from Repatriation; Learning NAGPRAJen Shannon will be a featured panelist for this event at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science on Saturday
    November 21 from 11:00am – 2:00pm in Ricketson Auditorium. On November 16, 1990, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) became a U.S. federal
    law. In honor of its 25th anniversary, the “Learning NAGPRA” project is hosting a public event as a space for reflection and discussion on the importance of collaborative working relationships in respecting and supporting Native American cultural traditions. A panel of invited speakers with professional NAGPRA experience will reflect on two main themes:
    1) What is the importance and the meaning of NAGPRA?
    2) What lessons from NAGPRA can be applied to the broader challenges of working together in a multicultural society?
  • Jen Shannon’s documentary can be viewed via this link on Vimeo: Public version: https://vimeo.com/118650096, My Cry Gets up to My Throat: Reflections on Reverend Case, the Garrison Dam, and the North Dakota Oil Boom through Collaborative Anthropology with the Mandan Hidatsa Arikara Nation As community members reflect on the role of a prominent missionary and his fight against the US Government program that dammed the Missouri River and flooded their homelands in the 1950s, they see parallels with the oil boom today.

October 2015

  • Art Joyce and adjunct professor Tim Webmoor launch a call for sessions for the North American Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG) meetings, an annual international conference of archaeologists to be hosted by the CU Department of Anthropology in April. For details: TAG 2016
  • Publication: Alchemy in the Rain Forest: Politics, Ecology, and Resilience in a New Guinea Mining Area. Jerry K. Jacka’s newest publication from Duke University Press.
    ISBN 978-0-8223-5979-1 Paperback.
    In Alchemy in the Rain Forest Jerry K. Jacka explores how the indigenous population of Papua New Guinea’s highlands struggle to create meaningful lives in the midst of extreme social conflict and environmental degradation. Drawing on theories of political ecology, place, and ontology and using ethnographic, environmental, and historical data, Jacka presents a multilayered examination of the impacts large-scale commercial gold mining in the region has had on ecology and social relations. Despite the deadly interclan violence and widespread pollution brought on by mining, the uneven distribution of its financial benefits has led many Porgerans to call for further development. This desire for increased mining, Jacka points out, counters popular portrayals of indigenous people as innate conservationists who defend the environment from international neoliberal development. Jacka’s examination of the ways Porgerans search for common ground between capitalist and indigenous ways of knowing and being points to the complexity and interconnectedness of land, indigenous knowledge, and the global economy in Porgera and beyond.
  • Jeff Brzezinski and Jessica Hedgepeth Balkin (PhD students) were each awarded an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement grant in support of their archaeological field research in Oaxaca, Mexico. Jeff’s site is at Cerro de la Virgen. Jessica received her grant for The Rio Verde Settlement Project (RVSP) on the coast. During the Spring semester of 2016, she will be conducting archaeological survey and soil sampling in order to investigate the relationship between environmental change, settlement patterns, and demography between 700 BCE and CE 1522.
  • The BBC is featuring the village where Robin Bernstein works in Gambia in a production called “Countdown to Life.” Here is a link to the clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzX78PDF1sg. The baby in the video (that is being weighed etc) is a ‘HERO-G’ (Robin’s study acronym) baby, and the midwife is also working on her project! The epigenetics results are from the same populations, although results from Robin’s study won’t be out for a couple of years.
  • Paul Sandberg (Lecturer, PhD ’12) has taken a one-year post-doctoral position at the University of Oklahoma’s Sam Noble Museum, where Marc Levine (PhD ’07) is Curator of Archaeology. He’ll be starting in January.
  • Willi Lempert (PhD Candidate): Last week at the National Remote Indigenous Media Festival in Lajamanu Community, PAKAM Media received the NITV Spirit Award for a short film that Lempert made with the Kapululangu Women’s Law and Culture Centre in Balgo. The $30,000 award to PAKAM is intended to extend “Marumpu Wangka: Kukatja Hand Talk” into a half-hour prime-time production with the help of mentors from National Indigenous Television. Lempert also recently received the Lois Roth Foundation Fulbright Project Support Award for $1,750 to support creative collaborative projects with Indigenous Australians.
  • “Tools of the Camel Hunters”: The Mahaffy Cache Exhibit Opens October 9 at the CU Museum You never know what you’ll find beneath the flatirons.
    Landscapers came across a cache of stone tools in a Boulder yard and had the presence to ask Doug Bamforth to check them out. The tools turned out to be 13,000 years old, and their prey extinct!
    Exhibit details here: http://cumuseum.colorado.edu/current-exhibits. Thirteen millennia in a Boulder backyard. Read the story on the Mahaffy Cache in the latest Coloradan magazine: http://www.coloradanmagazine.org/2015/09/01/tools-of-the-camel-hunters/

September 2015

  • Bert Covert has just received an NSF grant for $99,800 titled “Workshops on Research in the Lower Mekong Basin” toconvene US researchers who are already engaged in, or interested in developing research partnerships in Lower Mekong Basin (LMB), a region that includes parts of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and Myanmar. The objective of this workshop series is to facilitate mechanisms and networking strategies for research partnerships between US scientists and LMB scientists that advance US and global scientific knowledge, improve data sharing and accessibility, and identify best practices.
  • Matt Sponheimer has been studying a new candidate for the human family tree, Australopithecus sediba. Both will be featured in a NOVA segment on the Dawn of Humanity September 16. Professor Sponheimer is Director of the Nutritional and Isotopic Ecology Lab (NIEL) here at UCB, where several of his graduate student advisees are involved in his research. Two in particular, Oliver Paine and Jennifer Leichliter, have worked previously with Lee Berger, principal investigator in these hominid discoveries. Jen and Oliver will be directly involved in the science that attempts to unravel the mysteries of naledi and their place.

August 2015

  • Terry McCabe landed a $425,000 NSF grant for a new project: “Collaborative Research: Event Ecology and Extreme Events as Transformative Factors in Pastoral Social-Ecological Systems”. McCabe is PI for the 3-year research project and his team includes former advisee Alicia Davis (PhD ‘10), now associated with the University of Glasgow. CU-Boulder will contribute an additional $275.000.
  • Steve Lekson is quoted in the August 21 issue of Science Magazine in the article “Big Archaeology fights Big Oil to preserve ancient landscape”. pp. 774-775. Researchers say fracking threatens hundreds of early Pueblo sites and endangers future excavations. Full article at: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/349/6250/774.summary
  • Bert Covert, our departing Chair, has received a Vietnam Education Foundation (VEF) Faculty Scholar Award for $50,000. This will support his research on the ecology and conservation of biodiversity with the Vietnam National University of Ho Chi Minh City – University of Science where he will work with the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology during part of the upcoming academic year. VEF is a US federal government exchange program in the sciences and education with Vietnam.
  • Scott Ferris Research Awards go to Richard Bender, Jen Leichliter, Oliver Paine, and Eric Schissler.
  • Alison Hanson won a Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship from the University of Pittsburgh, with an additional travel grant to be used for Hindi language study at AIIS in Jaipur this summer.
  • Dr. Ivy A. Rieger gave a successful defense of her doctoral thesis on Friday: Where the Clouds Descend: Fiestas and the Practice of Belonging in San Juan Mixtepec, Oaxaca, Mexico.
  • Associate Professor Carole McGranahan has been chosen by a Graduate School committee as a winner of the 2014-2015 Outstanding Faculty Graduate Advising Award. The honor comes with a cash award of $750 and a dossier full of praise for the help and encouragement she gives to her graduate students.
  • CU Department of Anthropology  welcomes this husband and wife team to our faculty this Fall!
    Associate Professor Jerry Jacka brings us his dynamism as Director of the Environmental Anthropology Lab and Faculty Fellow of the Texas Sustainable Energy Research Institute at UT San Antonio, where he serves on the Anthropology faculty.Professor Joanna Lambert has led a distinguished career as an integrative biological anthropologist and evolutionary ecologist. Her program centers on mammal nutritional biology and the natural selection of feeding‐related adaptations in mammals, especially African apes, Old World monkeys, and Carnivora. She has held professional service roles at a number of storied organizations, including the NSF, the Smithsonian, the AAAS, and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. A very hearty welcome to both. They will each bring new depth and dimension to our program.
  • Graduate Part-Time Instructor Teaching Excellence Award from the CU Grad School, Richard Bender (PhD student in Biological Anthropology).
  • Goldstein-Altman Awards, Drew Zackary and Sara Stiehl have won awards from the Goldstein-Altman Research Award Fund for 2015. Stay tuned for news of their travels and research.
  • Michaela Howells (PhD ’13) was awarded an Engaged Anthropology Grant from Wenner Gren. This grant provides the funds necessary for her return to American Samoa to share the results of her dissertation on Maternal Psychosocial Stress and Neonate Outcomes on the Pacific Island of Tutuila. Howells currently serves on the Anthropology faculty at UNC Wilmington.
  • Screening of People's Park, a 78-minute single shot film by Libbie D. Cohn and J.P. Sniadecki
    Tuesday, April 14, 7:00 pm
    ATLAS 102, CU Boulder
    Free and open to the public. Followed by a roundtable discussion featuring Daniel Boord (Film Studies/Critical Media Practices), Christian S. Hammons (Anthropology), and Timothy Oakes (Geography).
  • Jakob Sedig gave a successful defense of his dissertation on The Mimbres Transitional Phase: Examining Social, Demographic, and Environmental Resilience and Vulnerability from AD 900-1000 in Southwest New Mexico and will be awarded the doctorate in May. This has to be a record, completing a doctorate in archaeology in a mere five years.We humbly congratulate Jakob and advisor, Cathy Cameron.
  • Traci Bekelman (PhD Candidate) won the E.E. Hunt Student Award at the recent annual meeting of the Human Biology Association, March 25-26, in St. Louis, MO. The Association gives only one or two of these awards each year for outstanding student presentations. Traci’s poster presentation, which analyzes data from her recently-completed fieldwork in Costa Rica, was entitled “Using the Protein Leverage Hypothesis to understand obesity among urban Costa Rican women.” Congratulations to Traci and advisor, Darna Dufour. Info from Human Biology Association website (not yet updated to this year): http://humbio.org/eehunt
  • Robin Fiore made a successful defense of her thesis and has earned the title of Master of Arts. She conducted research for A Survey of Indochinese Silvered Langurs (Trachypithecus Germaini) in Phu Quoc National Park, Vietnam with her advisor, Bert Covert. Congratulations to both.
  • Katy Putsavage has accepted a tenure-track Assistant Professor position in the Department of Anthropology and Applied Archaeology at Eastern New Mexico University. She will be starting in the Fall of 2015 as the Southwestern Ceramicist in the department.
  • Michaela Howells (PhD ’13) has accepted an Assistant Professor position at the University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW). “I have spent the last year as a Visiting Professor at UNCW and am confident that I have found an excellent fit with both the faculty and university. This position will support my continued research on reproductive health disparities while enabling me to develop courses that address human evolution.”
  • Terry Odendahl (PhD ’82) will be honored Friday in a sold-out event celebrating International Women’s Day in Denver. Terry is chief executive officer of Boulder-based Global Greengrants Fund, which has distributed more than 8,500 grants to social and environmental justice causes around the world. Her recognition of the ties between women’s rights and the environment will be praised at a luncheon in the Denver Art Museum. For more details, read the Boulder Daily Camera story at: http://www.dailycamera.com/Lifestyle/ci_27612276/Boulder-woman-works-to-make-impact-on-social-enviromental-justice
  • Scott Ortman and Steve Lekson were interviewed for a PBS television segment on Cliff Dwellings sponsored by Rocky Mountain Adventure Quest Magazine.
  • Doug Bamforth has been selected by his peers for a Boulder Faculty Assembly Faculty Recognition Award to honor his continued support of the CU Community through service activities. Our incoming Chair “…has done exemplary work for the students in Sewall and for the RAP community in general…His focus on CU students and their success are not only commendable but serve as an example for what the faculty at CU can accomplish.”
  • The Department of Anthropology and the Research Center for Unmanned Vehicles (RECUV) of the University of Colorado-Boulder have agreed to construct and test a specialized Unmanned Aerial Vehicle for archeological applications. Gerardo Gutierrez, Eric W. Frew, James Mack and Steve Lekson are joining expertise and resources to design an Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) dedicated to recording multi-spectral remote sensing and aerial photogrammetric data on geophysical, archaeological, and human landscapes. This project will promote academic cooperation between the colleges of Arts & Sciences and Engineering & Applied Science and is a response to the Grand Challenge Imagination Summit promoted by UCB.
  • Le Khac Quyet, a University of Colorado Boulder alumnus who found a previously undiscovered population of critically endangered monkeys in Vietnam has won the 2014 Sabin Prize for Excellence in Primate Conservation. In 2002, Le discovered a new population of the Tonkin snub-nosed monkey, a critically endangered primate restricted to a small area of northernmost Vietnam. Full Article
  • Dr. Katherine Fischer earned her doctorate with a successful defense of her dissertation entitled: The Ends of Coffee: State, Work, and Identity in Post-CAFTA Costa Rica.
  • Robin Bernstein Levelling the Academic Playing Field for Women Scientists
    The AAPA’s Committee on Diversity (COD) has made increasing diversity within physical anthropology a priority. We are pleased to announce that the COD Women’s Initiative Co-chairs Robin Bernstein (University of Colorado, Boulder) and Andrea Taylor (Duke University) have received a grant through the Elsevier Foundation New Scholars Program to create a self-sustaining infrastructure administered by the AAPA to improve the environment for all women physical anthropologists. This two-year grant will support career development initiatives including domestic and international career development workshops, and the creation of sustainable toolkits and webinars that can be easily accessed and widely shared in order to initiate and continue conversations about strategic career planning and work-life satisfaction. The Elsevier Foundation media release can be found at http://www.elsevier.com/connect/elsevier-foundation-awards-$600k-to-innovative-libraries-and-women-in-science/
  • William Porter Bourie will defend his doctoral dissertation on Knowledge-Networks of Climate Change and Development: How God and Technoscience Influence USAID Projects in Burkina Faso. Friday, November 14 at 11:00am in Hale 450.
  • Quyet Le Khac (PhD 2014) has been selected as the winner of the 2014 Annual Sabin Prize for Excellence in Primate Conservation. This prize was created by New York philanthropist Andy Sabin, and is intended to recognize outstanding contributions in the conservation of endangered primates, especially in top priority habitat countries. This prize carries with it an award of $20,000 US and all travel expenses to the award ceremony in New York on January 21.
  • Oliver Paine received a Wenner Gren dissertation research grant for $19,100 to cover the analytical costs of the nutritional component of his dissertation research. The project is titled “Investigating the Nutritional and Mechanical properties of potential hominin plant foods in African savanna microhabitats”.
  • “Life Back Then.” The Fall edition of American Archaeology magazine includes interviews from two of our professors, Cathy Cameron and Scott Ortman, on an emerging model of archaeological inquiry into what is was like to live in prehistoric North America.
  • Gerardo Gutiérrez – most recent book has just been published by INAH (National Institute of Anthropology and History) in Mexico City. Title in English: Politics and Territory in the Kingdom of Tlapa-Tlachinollan ISBN: 978-607-96598-0-6 With a presentation by Miguel Leon Portilla (the author of Broken Spears).
  • Andie Ang and colleagues Dr. Luu Hong Truong and Tran Van Bung of the Southern Institute of Ecology have been awarded a National Geographic Waitt grant of $11,829! This grant funds proof-of-concept projects, and will be used for constructing canopy bridges for the conservation of Indochinese silvered langurs in Vietnam. The title of the project is “Adding an extra branch: fighting genetic isolation by reconnecting endangered Indochinese silvered langur populations in Vietnam with canopy bridges”.
  • Jen Ida is portrayed, along with a summary of her research in Colombia on zoonotic disease, in the October edition of Grad Student News.
  • Steve Lekson was one of three leaders in the profession chosen for an ‘Exclusive Museum Anthropology Blog Interview’ for this AAA section online journal.
  • Art Joyce and his PhD advisee, Jamie Forde, have a new book out, El Pueblo de la Tierra del Cielo: Arqueología de la Mixteca de la Costa  Arqueología Oaxaqueña, Serie Popular 2, Centro INAH Oaxaca, Oaxaca, Mexico (2014).
  • Erin Baxter wins Best Digital Data Management Plans and Practices Competition on September 17, 2014. Several awards were made to those who had submitted proposals to the data management plan competition sponsored by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research. The winners received $2,000 in general research funds. Erin Baxter was the winner in the category of Arts and Humanities.
  • Tim Webmoor co-edited a volume for the Science, Technology and Society Series for Routledge, Visualization in the Age of Computerization. The volume gathers theoretical insights with case studies from a range of disciplines to detail how computerized imagery is impacting the academy. The volume features collaborations by archaeologists, anthropologists, and science and technology studies (STS) scholars.
  • Christian Hammons‘ post, “Beheaded: An Anthropology”, is featured on the cover of the latest Anthropology News.
  • Steve Lekson weighed in for Science magazine with his expert opinion on the cacao trade before there was a border along the Rio Grande. In the August 29 issue, the article “A Chocolate Habit in Ancient North America” reports on presumed cacao residues found on pottery from Chaco and Cahokia, among other sites. “…cacao shows us that ancient civilizations north of the border were deeply and significantly connected to the civilizations of Mesoamerica,” observed Lekson.
  • Bert Covert received a Margot Marsh Biodiversity Foundation award of $15,000 for his project in “Conservation Planning for the Endangered Indochinese Silvered langur on Phu Quoc Island, Vietnam.”
  • Oliver Paine won a full research award ($13,500) from the Leaky Foundation for his field work this July and next January in South Africa. This is a highly prestigious award. Kudos to Oliver and advisor Sponheimer.
  • Willi Lempert is our third recipient of a Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant. This will round out his Fulbright Fellowship for his project on “Broadcasting Indigeneity: The Social Life of Aboriginal Media,” in the town of Broome and the remote Aboriginal community of Yungngora in Northwestern Australia. Hats off to him and to advisor Jen Shannon.
  • Guy Hepp won the Squint and Juanita Moore Scholarship from the Montrose Community Foundation in Montrose, CO, augmenting his research funding for biological analysis of faunal remains at the site of La Consentida in Oaxaca.
  • Emily Mertz (PhD ’12) was offered (and accepted) a full time advising position in the Dean’s Office of Arts and Sciences at Kansas State University.
  • Michelle Sauther is acknowledged in the latest featured article of OnlinePhDProgram.org recognizing the compelling work of professors at some of the top research universities in the United States: http://onlinephdprogram.org/notable-research-professors. The article recognizes faculty from universities across the US that are designated as having high or very high research activity on the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education.
  • Alice Hamilton Scholarships: The Colorado Archaeological Society made awards to nine scholars this year, including three PhD candidates from CU Boulder: Erin Baxter,Guy Hepp, and Pascale Meehan. The Society was so impressed by Erin Baxter’s proposal that they tripled the amount she asked for.
  • Darna Dufour is the 2014 recipient of the Franz Boas Distinguished Acheivement Award given out by the Human Biology Association. This is a most prestigious honor given to members of the Association for exemplary contributions to human biology in science, scholarship, and other professional service. More information about this award can be found at http://www.humbio.org/boas-award.
  • Alison Cool will be joining our faculty in 2015, after completing a Post-Doc at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, CA. She accepted one year of a Hixon-Riggs Early Career Fellowship in Science and Technology Studies at the college: www.hmc.edu/about-hmc
  • Jamie Forde has added a dissertation fellowship at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies to his list of awards. The McNeil Center is a research consortium at the University of Pennsylvania. His fellowship is for the 2014-2015 academic year.
  • Willi Lempert was selected for a 2014-2015 Fulbright U.S. Student Award to Australia. The Fulbright Program is the flagship international educational exchange program of the United States. He will represent the country as a cultural ambassador while he is overseas, helping to enhance mutual understanding between Americans and the people in Australia.
  • Magda Stawkowski has accepted a Stanton Nuclear Security Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University.
  • Dani Merriman and Alison Hanson are this year’s recipients of the Goldstein Altman Awards. Dani was also awarded a Center to Advance Research and Teaching in the Social Sciences (CARTSS) Graduate Fellowship for her project on “Cyclical Histories of Conflict: Art and Visual Narratives of Violence in Colombia.” Alison was selected for a FLAS to take Hindi this summer at SASLI in Madison.
  • Jonathan O’Brien gave a successful defense of his doctoral dissertation and anticipates a PhD in May.
  • Alicia Hernandez passed her thesis defense and will be honored with an MA in our May ceremonies.
  • Liza Dombrowsky, Dawa Lokyitsang, and Evan Hawkins will also receive MA’s in May, each having passed their Comprehensive/Final Exams for Cultural Anthropology. Liza will be awarded two degrees, an MA and an MBA
  • Maya; Hidden Worlds Revealed – Now at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science
    This extensive and uniquely interactive exhibit features the work of several members of our department, including PhD student Jeff Brzezinski’s research in Belize, academic coordination by Marc Levine (PhD ’07, now faculty-curator at University of Oklahoma) and a replica of the village at El Cerén excavated by Payson Sheets.
  • Payson Sheets’ latest publication on the Joya de Cerén site where he does his research was released by the University of El Salvador, translated from the Spanish by Roberto Gallardo (MA ’04): Joya de Cerén: Patrimonio Cultural de la Humanidad 1993-2013; ISBN 978-99923-27-81-4.
  • Guy Hepp won a Graduate Fellow Award from the Center to Advance Research and Teaching in the Social Sciences. Hepp plans to use the money to fund a summer laboratory study in Oaxaca, for which he will analyze faunal remains as a final component of his dissertation research.
  • Herbert Covert, our recently re-elected Chair, is lauded in the latest Arts & Science Ezine for his exceptional conservation work in Vietnam. Covert expresses “profound satisfaction working to preserve modern, endangered primates” in a region where biodiversity is particularly at risk and the habitats of five of the world’s 25 most-endangered primates are threatened. Follow Covert’s unexpected trail to conservation work from his roots in paleontology at:
    http://artsandsciences.colorado.edu/magazine/2014/03/vietnamese-primates-get-helping-hand-from-cu-prof
  • Alison Hanson was selected as a recipient for FLAS (Foreign Language and Area Studies) for the 2014/15 academic year (contingent upon anticipated funding for the program), and selected as an alternate for summer funding.
  • Drew Zackary was selected for an Adaptation Decision-Making and Environmental Communication Summer Internship in Africa. Hope all you grad students read the details in your Grad School newsletter, along with stories about the genetics of procrastination and how “PBS Newshour wants to hear from Basic Researchers”:
    http://www.colorado.edu/GraduateSchool/resources/newsletters.html
  • Katy Putsavage received the Fred Plog Memorial Fellowship from the SAA. The $1000 fellowship supports the research of a graduate student with ABD status who is writing a dissertation on the American Souhwest.
  • Kate Fischer won a grant from the Ruth Landes Mermorial Research Fund to complete writing of her dissertation.
  • Traci Bekelman garnered two awards: a Wenner Gren Fellowship for her doctoral research proposal on “Using the Protein Leverage Hypothesis to Understand Socioeconomic Variation in Diet and Body Size amoung Urban Costa Rican Women” and a 2013 Dean’s Graduate Student Research Grant to carry out her research on “Urban Poverty, Dietary Protein and Obesity among Costa Rican Women.”
  • Scott Ortman was recognized for his longtime commitment to the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center with an honor award on October 19, 2013. Crow Canyon is a nonprofit research and education organization located in southwestern Colorado.
  • Donna Goldstein’s work on Race, Class, Violence, and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown, was just released with a new preface by University of California Press for their California Series in Public Anthropology. Donna’s Laughter out of Place is in its second printing.
  • Steve Lekson and Jakob Sedig recently co-published a column for the Colorado Archaeological Society about, “Mimbres, Then and Now.” Surveyor 11(4): 10-12.
  • Andie Ang received the Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Grant which is awarded to individual species conservation initiatives and recognizes leaders in the field of species conservation. This will support Ang’s PhD work on the Tonkin snub-nosed monkeys in Vietnam, which are among the 25 most endangered primates of the world.
  • A bilingual DVD tour of Payson Sheets’ site in El Salvador, La Joya de Cerén, is now available through Media Services at Norlin Library.
  • Jason Scott has won a Fulbright Hays grant that will enable him to complete his doctoral research analyzing digital development projects in Brazilian shantytowns (favelas) that were recently recuperated from armed drug gangs.
  • Payson Sheets’ excavations at El Cerén, El Salvador, are colorfully illustrated in the cover story of the fall edition of American Archaeologist magazine. At “the Pompeii of the Americas”, as it is nicknamed, “fourteen hundred years ago a volcanic eruption simultaneously destroyed a Maya village and preserved it for posterity. The remarkable preservation is giving archaeologists new insights into Maya life.”
  • As a member of the advisory board at the University Press of Colorado, Payson Sheets has launched an innovation bridging print to the internet. In Re-Creating Primordial Time, a new hardback release on Maya glyphs, footnotes have been replaced by QR codes that take you directly to the source research paper.
  • Cathy Cameron’s article in the June issue of American Anthropologist is now available, “How People Moved among Ancient Societies: Broadening the View. American Anthropologist 115(2):218-231.
  • Jakob Sedig published a report on his excavations at Woodrow Ruin in the Santa Fe journal El Palacio: Sedig, Jakob. 2013. Woodrow Ruin; an Atypical Mimbres site. El Palacio118 (3): 49-55.
  • Lindsay Ofrias co-authored an article that has just been published on the City of Boulder’s Energy Future website. It’s a policy document that looks at ways that Boulder could further encourage distributed solar generation within city limits.
  • The Institute of Behavioral Science has announced the opening on May 8th of a research exhibit featuring the work of J. Terrence McCabe, “Maintaining Pastoral Identity in a Changing World: The Turkana and Maasai People of East Africa”. The exhibit includes objects and long-term field research photography from northwest Kenya and northern Tanzania.
  • Craig Lee (PhD’07) and colleagues at INSTAAR recently made a short film on the collaborative archaeological work they are conducting in Glacier National Park entitled, Alpine Archeology in the Land of the Blackfeet, Kootenai, Pend d’Orielle and Salish.
  • Terry McCabe participated in the NSF’s 2012 All Scientists Meeting of the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network in Estes Park last September… “to make the case for integrating more anthropologists into the study of ecosystems.” The NSF created the LTER Network in 1980 to support long-term research of ecosystems with the understanding that many ecosystem processes can only be studied through long-term research. Sites were selected to represent major ecosystem types or natural biomes across the US (there are now also a few international LTER sites). It is one of the most highly funded NSF programs.
  • Anthropology lecturer Heather Williams (PhD 2011) will be working for the Boulder County Health Improvement Collaborative coordinating a small project designed to provide information about patients’ experiences within the local health care services system.
  • Jamie Forde, PhD student, has been awarded a junior fellowship for the next academic year at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, administered by the Trustees for Harvard University, in Washington D.C. The fellowship provides lodging, an office at the facility, and a living stipend, and will support him while writing his doctoral dissertation.
  • Cathy Cameron will have an article published in the June issue of American Anthropologist entitled “How People Moved Among Ancient Societies: Broadening the View”.
  • The latest book authored by Gerardo Gutierrez is entitled, El Poder Compartido; ensayos sobre la arqueología de organizaciones políticas segmentarias y oligárquicas, ISBN 978-607-486-199-0. (Shared Power – Essays about the Archaeology of Segmentary and Oligarchy Political Organizations)
  • Editor, Art Joyce, has just released Polity and Ecology in Formative Period Costal Oaxaca through University Press of Colorado . Chapters were authored by department alumni Stacy Barber, Marc Levine, Michelle Butler, Arion Mayes and current PhD candidate Guy Hepp.
  • Steve Lekson is featured in a video produced by the CU Museum.
  • A lead story in the January 23 edition of the New Yorker online refers readers to Carole McGranahan’s co-edited special issue of the journal Cultural Anthropology on the topic of the self-immolations in Tibet. Go to http://www.culanth.org/?q=node/526 to see the referenced article.
  • Guy Hepp, PhD candidate, and Stacy Barber (PhD ’05) recently published their findings at Oaxaca: “Ancient Aerophones of Coastal Oaxaca, Mexico: The Archaeological and Social Context of Music”. In Sound from the Past: The Interpretation of Musical Artifacts in an Archaeological Context, edited by R. Eichmann, F.Jianjun, and L-C. Koch, pp. 259-270.
  • Matt Sponheimer, Julia A. Lee-Thorp, Kaye E. Reed and Peter Ungar will be publishing a book entitled, “Early Hominin Paleoecology” with University Press of Colorado due out May 2013. It provides a good working knowledge of the subject while also presenting a solid grounding in the sundry ways this knowledge has been constructed. The book is divided into 3 sections – climate and environment (with a particular focus on the latter), adaptation and behavior, and modern analogs and models – and features contributors from various fields of study, including archaeology, primatology, paleoclimatology, sedimentology, and geochemistry.
  • PhD candidate, Ivy Hepp, recently received the Ruth Landes Memorial Research Fund grant from The Reed Foundation in New York in support of her dissertation research project entitled “Where the Clouds Descend: Fiestas and the Politics of Belonging in San Juan Mixtepec, Oaxaca, Mexico.
  • Gerardo Gutierrez went to Guerrero, Mexico over Winter Break to explain migrations depicted in a painting from Chiepetlán, a municipality of Tlapa, Guerrero, Mexico.
  • Michaela Howells (PhD candidate) and co-authors Richard Bender (PhD student), et al. were awarded the 2012 Biological Anthropology Section student prize for outstanding presentation at the recent American Anthropological Association meeting for their presentation “You Just Have to Wait: The Impact of Marital Status on the Pregnancy Outcomes of Samoan Women”. This “high quality scholarship” research project was also co-authored by Darna Dufour.
  • A front page article, “Pharmaceutical Bioprospecting and the Law: The Case of Unckaloabo in a Former Apartheid Homeland of South Africa” can be found in Anthropology News 53(10):6-7 and was authored by graduate student Chris Morris.
  • Donna Goldstein has published, “Experimentalité: Pharmaceutical insights into anthropology’s epistemologically fractured self.” In: Susan Levine, ed. Medicine and the Politics of Knowledge. Cape Town, South Africa: HSRC.
  • PhD Candidate Marnie Thomson has published her first article, “Black Boxes of Bureaucracy: Transparency and Opacity in the Resettlement Process of Congolese Refugees.” PoLAR: Vol. 35, No. 2. Page 186.
  • Inga Calvin will be the resident “Maya specialist” on the Not the End of the World Cruise, December 16-23. Inga will be giving lectures in glyphs and a tour of Coba on December 21.
  • An NSF grant to explore the political economy and the Sacbé at Cerén this coming summer was awarded to Payson Sheets. The excavation crew will include Zan Halmbacher, Rachel Egan, and Chris Dixon.
  • Among the highlights of the annual American Anthropological Association Conference was a presentation, “From Sacred Baths to Stretch Limos: Tamil Puberty Celebrations in Sri Lanka and Canada” byDennis McGilvray and R. Cheran (University of Windsor, Ontario). Recent Anthropology lecturer (Currently with CU’s Residential Academic Program) Sara Jamieson organized the panel: Coming of Age in the 21st Century: Female Puberty Rites Revisited.
  • PhD student, William Lempert, has published “Telling Their Own Stories: Indigenous Film as Critical Identity Discourse”, in The Applied Anthropologist 32(1):23-32.
  • A compelling portrait of a rare Tonkin snub-nosed monkey (spotted in the rainforest of Vietnam) appears on page five of the November 2012 National Geographic Magazine. PhD student, Quyet Le’s photo, was selected as the latest winner of their “Wildlife as Canon Sees It” campaign in support of endangered wildlife.
  • Gerardo Gutierrez made worldwide news for his cooperative research with the University of Malaga to simulate the possible occurrence of a tsunami wave in Lake Texcoco that affected the Island of Mexico-Tenochtitlan circa 1500 A.D. See Spanish language link at http://www.lapatria.com/descubriendo/cientificos-van-reconstruir-tsunami-en-mexico-del-ano-1500-15654.
  • A major exhibition of Maya pottery opens October 19-21 at Princeton University. Several of Inga Calvin’s rollout photographs have been included in the catalogue entitled, “Dancing into Dreams: Maya Vase Painting of the Ik’ Kingdom”: http://www.princetonartmuseum.org/art/exhibitions/1384.
  • Cathy Cameron co-published an article in the September Anthropology News on “Archaeological and Bioarchaeological Perspectives on Captivity and Slavery”.
  • James Millette, PhD student, has received a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant and a Leaky Foundation Grant to conduct his fieldwork for: “Challenging Assumptions of Dental Senescence Using a Primate Framework”. His current work is on ring-tailed lemurs at the Beza Mahafaly Special Reserve in Southwestern Madagascar.
  • Art Joyce was awarded a grant from the Religion and Innovation in Human Affairs Program of the Historical Society through the Templeton Foundation. His funded archaeological project is designed to examine the role of religion in the social and political innovations that led to the emergence of Mesoamerican civilization. The final product will be a co-authored book examining the relationship between religion and political centralization in Formative Mesoamerica.
  • Donna Goldstein has accepted the directorship of the Center to Advance Research and Teaching in the Social Sciences (CARTSS).
  • The June 2012 issue of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology features a series of articles on “Dental Ecology” stemming from a symposium held at the 2010 annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists organized by Frank Cuozzo and Michelle Sauther. CU-Boulder Anthropology affiliated authors in this volume include Frank Cuozzo (PhD ‘2000; Adjunct Associate Professor), Michelle Sauther (Associate Professor), Matt Sponheimer (Associate Professor), and James Millette (PhD candidate).
  • Paul Sandberg (PhD candidate) and Matt Sponheimer published a study in the June 27 Nature online magazine, suggesting that Austalopithecus sediba was unique among our most ancient hominid relatives in yet another way: its chimp-like diet.
  • Darna Dufour co-edited a second edition of her Nutritional Anthropology textbook, just released from Oxford University Press.
  • Dawa Lokyitsang, MA student, has been selected as a recipient of a Dalai Lama Trust scholarship for 2012-2013. The scholarship program is intended to further the human capital development of the Tibetan people by supporting the pursuit of excellence among Tibetan students in a specialized academic field.
  • A Fulbright grant to conduct dissertation fieldwork in Burkina Faso, West Africa, has been awarded to PhD candidate Wm. Porter Bourie. Drawing from his experiences as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Togo and preliminary fieldwork in Niger and Mali, Porter will be examining local environmental knowledge of desertification in the context of a water resource management project.
  • Courtney Lee (MA ’06) received her PhD this May from the University of Colorado-Denver in Health & Behavioral Sciences. Her dissertation was awarded the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences 2011-2012 Outstanding Graduate Student Award and was entitled, Costa Rica at a Crossroads: The Ideological Contradictions of Medical Tourism.
  • Amy Harrison Levine, PhD student, has been awarded a Margot Marsh Biodiversity Foundation grant for her dissertation project. The award is going through the Denver Zoo where Amy is employed full-time as Conservation Biology Manager.
  • The CU Center to Advance Research in the Social Sciences Board awarded Donna Goldstein Smith Scholar Funds in support of her project entitled Genetic Futures of the Nuclear Age: Anthropologist and Human Geneticist Dr. James V. Neel.  Graduate student Lindsay Ofrias has been awarded CARTSS Graduate Fellow Funds in support of her project Oil Waste Cleanup in the Ecuadorian Amazon: Citizenship, the State, and Transnationalism.
  • Paul Sandberg was nominated by the department and has been selected to receive a 2012 Graduate Summer Fellowship. He’ll be using it to complete Investigating Childhood Diet and Early Life History in the Archaeologicl Record Using Biogeochemical Techniques.
  • Graduate students Chris Morris and Magda Stawkowski have both been selected to receive a 2012-2013 Graduate School Dissertation Completion Fellowship. This fellowship will support them for one semester during the 2012-2013 academic year.
  • Katy Putsavage was accepted for a fellowship to a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute program: “Mesoamerica and the Southwest: A New History for an Ancient Land”.  This five-week Institute is held on-site in Mexico and the U.S. Southwest and will enable participants to explore the rapidly accumulating new collaborative scholarship by investigators in both Mesoamerica and the ancient Southwest.
  • Graduate student Magda Stawkowski has won both the Social Science Research Council Eurasia Program Dissertation Development Award and the P.E.O. Scholar Award, which is granted by an international women’s organization.
  • Carole McGranahan received a Fulbright Scholar Grant for her upcoming research in India in 2013 on her project, “Refugees and Citizenship: Tibetan Practices of Political Subjectivity in Postcolonial India”.
  • The keynote lecture at the “Learning by Example: Building Arguments Ethnographically” Conference at Oxford University on April 16 will be given by Carole McGranahan.
  • 2 articles will be published in March/April 2012 that were authored by Carole McGranahan: “An Anthropologist in Political Asylum Court, Part I”  and “Anthropology and the Truths of Political Asylum, Part II”, both in Anthropology News.
  • Matt Sponheimer’s recent Science paper on hominin diets was referenced in the cover story of the latest Scientific American, “First of Our Kind” which examines Lee Berger’s controversial interpretations of Australopithecus sediba’s place in hominin ancestry.
  • Dennis McGilvray was interviewed for KGNU’s “Living Dialogs” broadcast of the Asia on Edge Symposium.
  • Gerardo Gutierrez collaborated on a comprehensive study on the genetic admixture of the Latino American population. The results are on file in the Library of Congress, entitled “Development of a Panel of Genome-Wide Ancestry Informative Markers to Study Admixture Throughout the Americas”, http://www.plosgenetics.org/doi/pgen.1002554.
  • Graduate student Michaela Howells made the cover of the Samoa News (the islands’ newspaper) for a community outreach effort – judging an island fafafine contest.
  • Cathy Cameron is among the visiting scholars invited to Southern Illinois University at the end of March 2012 to speak at the conference on “The Archaeology of Slavery: Toward a Comparative, Global Framework”. The annual conference is sponsored by the Center for Archaeological Investigations in Carbondale.
  • Graduate student, Guy Hepp, received a Dissertation Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation for his research in Oaxaca, Mexico.
  • A National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement Grant was also given to Katy Putsavage for her study of “Demographic and Social Transformations in the Mimbres Region: An Investigation of the Black Mountain Site and Phase (A.D. 1130 to 1300)”.
  • Jakob Sedig, graduate student, has been awarded an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant. The grant will cover the cost of field equipment, lodging, transportation and artifact analysis for his research at Woodrow Ruin, in southwest New Mexico.
  • Carole McGranahan was featured in STEMinist Profiles, a regular feature spotlighting Women in Science, Tech, Engineering and Math.
  • PhD student Ben Joffe was interviewed as an anthropologist by students at the Logan School for Creative Learning in Denver about folklore, fairy tales and comparative mythology.
  • Graduate students, Oliver Paine and Jen Leichliter, gave a well-attended talk, “Paleoecological Reconstruction: Interpreting the South African Hominin Fossil Record” in the main lecture hall at The National Museum, Bloemfontein, South Africa.
  • Jamie Forde, PhD student, recently won an NSF doctoral dissertation improvement grant and a National Geographic Society/Waitt Grant to support his proposed project “The Conquest of the Hill of the Sun: Archaeological Investigations of Indigenous Cultural Change and Persistence at Colonial Achiutla, Oaxaca, Mexico”.

  • Surviving Sudden Environmental Change, Answers from Archaeology, edited by Jago Cooper and Payson Sheets, will be released in January 2012. Archaeologists have long encountered evidence of natural disasters through excavation and stratigraphy. In this book, case studies examine how eight different past human communities – ranging from Arctic to equatorial regions, from tropical rainforests to desert interiors, and from deep prehistory to living memory – faced and coped with such dangers.
  • Katy Putsavage published an article about her New Mexico research site in December’s Anthropology News Online.
  • PhD student, Katherine McCardwell, has an article on page 6 of the latest Anthropology News (v. 52, n. 9, Dec 2011), “Narrating the Local and Global; Peace Corps and Community in the Museum of Local History”. In the article, Kathy gives her perspective on how an exhibit at the Sheldon Museum and Cultural Center in Haines, Alaska ” . . . breaks down traditional ideas about local history as tied to a timeless other.”
  • Paul Shankman gave the 2011 Distinguished Lecture in Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History on December 15th. The subject of his lecture was Margaret Mead.
  • Graduate students Andie Ang, Marni LaFleur, Jen Leichliter, Willi Lempert, Morgan Seamont, Dani Merriman, and Oliver Paine have been awarded CU’s 2011 Haskell Houghtelin Grants for their research.
  • Michelle Sauther has been honored with a College Scholar award. She plans to use this award in the future to help work up ten years of data on lemur health and the effects of drought, cyclones and human changes in the environment at Beza Mahafaly, Madagascar.
  • PhD candidate, Jim Millette, has just received a Leakey Grant for his dissertation work at Beza Mahafaly, Madagascar on dental senescence. Along with the generous Scott Ferris fund, this will allow Jimto carry out his research beginning this June 2012.
  • Christine Dixon and Adam Blanford, PhD candidates, were co-authors with Payson Sheets for the article, “Manioc Cultivation at Cerén, El Salvador: Occasional Kitchen Garden Plant or Staple Crop?” which was published in the Spring 2011 edition of Cambridge University’s journal Ancient Mesoamerica.
  • Laura DeLuca (PhD ’02) received a Fulbright Specialist Program grant to support a short-term project in Pretoria, South Africa. She will be convening a round table meeting with Dr. Maphosa of the Africa Institute of South Africa in January 2012 for their book on Community-based Peace Building in Africa.
  • Art Joyce and Marc Levine (PhD ’07) have co-authored an article, “Shifting Patterns of Obsidian Exchange in Postclassic Oaxaca, Mexico” for the Spring 2011 edition of Cambridge University’s journal Ancient Mesoamerica. Payson Sheets has also published an article in the same edition of the journal, “Manioc Cultivation at Cerén, El Salvador: Occasional Kitchen Garden Plant or Staple Crop?”
  • Jamie Forde just won an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement grant. The title of his proposal is “Indigenous Responses to Colonialism at Achiutla, Oaxaca, Mexico.”
  • Art Joyce and Gerardo Gutiérrez were recently invited by Dumbarton Oaks to give presentations at their symposium. Joyce spoke on “Debating Warfare in Late Formative Oaxaca” and Gutiérrez offered his expertise on “Aztec Battlefields in Eastern Guerrero: A Landscape Analysis of the Conquest of the Kingdom of Tlapa-Tlachinollan.”
  • Matt Sponheimer and his research partner Peter Ungar were invited by Science magazine to write a review of the state of research in early hominin diets. Their piece appears in the latest edition of Science at: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6053/190.
  • Terry McCabe received a grant from NSF. He is Co-Principal Investigator with Paul Leslie on “Multi Level Response Diversity: Land Use, Livelihood Diversification and Resilience in Northern Tanzania.”
  • Magda Stawkowski (PhD Candidate) has been invited to present her research to the US State Department.
  • Payson Sheets and his excavation team in El Salvador stumbled upon a “sacbe” or “White Way.” Grad students Chris Dixon, Zan Halmbacher, and Theresa Heindel were proceeding with their NSF-funded dig when they struck upon a ceremonial road in the village of Ceren.
  • Gerardo Gutiérrez has published a new book called Contlalco y la Coquera which uncovers a strikingly early and massive pyramid site in Guerrero.
  • Marc Levine (PhD 2007) was recently elected to a one year term as Program Editor-Elect, to be followed by a two year term as Program Editor, for the Archaeology Division of the American Anthropological Association.
  • Katy Putsavage won an award from the American Philosophical Society through the Lewis and Clark Fund for Exploration and Field Research. More recently, Putsavage was awarded a UGGS Travel Grant to present at the Chacmool Conference this November.
  • PhD student Magda Stawkowski recently received a medal in Kazakhstan from Olzhas Suleimenov for her “outstanding contribution to the anti-nuclear movement.”  She also helped the Atomic Testing Museum (Nevada) and the Karaganda EcoMuseum (Kazakhstan) write a successful joint educational grant titled, “Nuclear Weapons Testing Legacy: The Tale of Two Cultures.”
  • Brenda Todd has been chosen to receive an Appreciation Award by the Board of Directors of the Arizona Archaeological and Historical Society for her work as assistant to Steve Lekson during his tenure as Acquisitions Editor of the journal Kiva.
  • Michelle Sauther and Frank Cuozzo (PhD ’00; Assoc. Prof. Anth. UND; Asst. Prof. Adjunct UCB) recently won an award for the best poster presentation at the 15th International Symposium on Dental Morphology held in August 2011 in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, United Kingdom. Their poster was titled, “Toothcomb function and use in wild ring-tailed lemurs: Implications for the evolution of the prosimian toothcomb” and was based on their long-term research in Madagascar.
  • PhD student Ivy Hepp has published an article in the Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers out of Berkeley. Her article, co-authored with Josh Englehardt, is entitled “Speaking the Same Language: Bridging the Ever-Growing Disciplinary Divide Between Cultural Anthropology and Archaeology” and can be found in Issue 100 of the journal via this link: http://kas.berkeley.edu/current-issues.html.
  • Katy Putsavage and Jakob Sedig conducted summer tours of their respective research sites for the New Mexico Archaeological Council. Katy provided an excellent tour of the Black Mountain and Salado pueblo excavations at the Black Mountain site; Jakob discussed his new research results from the Woodrow Ruin, a large Late Pithouse and Classic Mimbres occupation in the Gila River drainage.
  • Mark Mitchell (PhD ’11) has been asked to release his edited volume, Across a Great Divide, as an e-book from University of Arizona Press. (Across a Great Divide; Continuity and Change in Native North American Societies, 1400-1900. Edited by Laura L. Scheiber and Mark D. Mitchell. ISBN 978-0-8165-2871-4.)
  • PhD student Amy Harrison Levine, has accepted a senior level position at the Denver Zoo as Conservation Biology Coordinator. Her primary responsibility will be to manage a conservation program in Southeast Asia – the first component will include her dissertation research regarding threats to critically endangered Tonkin snub-nosed monkeys in Vietnam.
  • Matt Sponheimer is on a team whose recent findings regarding an extinct hominid nicknamed ‘Nutcracker Man’ have been widely publicized. They looked at the eating habits of Paranthropus boisei and findings will be published in the next issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. For a local news article, see http://www.dailycamera.com/news/ci_17977428?source=email.
  • Guy Hepp has won a Fulbright for his research in coastal Oaxaca, Mexico. Guy is interested in an Early Formative (ca 1900-850BC) site, La Consentida, and the origins of social complexity. He was recently able to establish the chronology of the site occupation with carbon dating.
  • Both Marnie Thomson and Michaela Howells have received Wenner Gren Foundation Awards.
  • Richard Bender won the Juan Comas Prize at the AAPA conference for his poster on “Stable isotopes(13C and 15N) track socioeconomic differences among urban Colombian women”.
  • National Science Foundation grants have been awarded to Payson Sheets for “Root Crop Agriculture, Land Use, and Authority Outside of the Ceren Village, El Salvador” and Art Joyce for “Collaborative Research: Political Integration of the Formative Period Rio Viejo State, Oaxaca, Mexico”.
  • Rachel Fleming has been selected for a Fulbright grant to India for 2011-2012. Rachel will use the grant to conduct her dissertation research in Bangalore, where she will study changes in family expectations and gender roles for upwardly mobile young women entering the professional workforce.
  • A National Geographic Society Research and Exploration Grant has been awarded to Marni La Fleur for her work in Madagascar.
  • Aimee Garza (MA ’07) has won a Ford Foundation fellowship to conduct field research for her PhD dissertation in cultural anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Aimee’s project will study cultural identities among Hispanic residents and Mexican migrants to Santa Fe, NM.
  • An International Dissertation Research Fellowship from The Social Science Research Council has been awarded to Marnie Thomson. The SSRC is an independent, nonprofit international organization that “nurtures new generations of social scientists, fosters innovative research, and mobilizes necessary knowledge on important public issues.” The IDRF will provide support for housing and living costs, return travel to her research site and related research expenses. Thomson is one of 77 awardees among 1213 applicants.
  • Jakob Sedig and Jessica Hedgepeth are each recipients of fellowships from the Center to Advance Research and Teaching in the Social Sciences.
  • There is a new article in the March edition of The SAA Archaeological Record. In “Still Digging”, Steve Lekson reflects on his professional path for the “Careers in Archaeology” section of the journal, pp. 32-34.
  • Kate Fischer wrote a book review for the April Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology. Her review is on pp. 201-212 and is of Peter Luetchford’s Fair Trade and a Global Commodity: Coffee in Costa Rica, London: Pluto Press, 2008.
  • David Hoffman (PhD ’06) and Alicia Davis (PhD ’10) have recently published articles in a special section of Conservation and Society on Protected Areas and Migration:http://www.conservationandsociety.org/currentissue.asp?sabs=n: “Do global statistics represent local reality and should they guide conservation policy?: Examples from Costa Rica” by David Hoffman and “Ha! What is the benefit of living next to the park? Factors limiting in-migration next to Tarangire National Park, Tanzania” by Alicia Davis.
  • Carole McGranahan has received a Fulbright grant, and a faculty research fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies, to go to India next year for her new research project “Refugees and Citizenship: Tibetan Practices of Political Subjectivity in Postcolonial India.”
  • Marc Levine (PhD ’07) has an article in the March American Anthropologist: “Negotiating Political Economy at Late Postclassic Tututepec (Yucu Dzaa), Oaxaca, Mexico. pp. 22-29. It is illustrated on the journal cover. Carlos Torres (PhD ’10) co-published a book review in the same edition of this prestigious journal. He and Katie Earnshaw (U. Cambridge) consider five photographic books from The Chiapas Photography Project in the Visual Anthropology section, pp. 154-156.
  • The Society for Applied Anthropology’s Human Rights Defender Travel Award has been given to graduate student Marnie Thomson.
  • Cathy Cameron is pictured in the January edition of Anthropology News announcing her Weatherhead Fellowship award for her book project Captives: Invisible Agents of Change. In the book she sheds light on the relationships of gender, power and sexuality that surround the lives of captive women throughout time.
  • Arizona State University plans to publish as a book, Mark Mitchell’s recently defended doctoral thesis on Continuity and Change in the Organization of Mandan Craft Production, 1400-1750.
  • Steve Lekson’s History of the Ancient Southwest was voted among the Notable Books of the Year by the Pima Public Library consortium.

  • Graduate student Katy Putsavage will receive funding from the New Mexico Archaeological Council for a neutron activation analysis (INAA) study of 50 ceramics from the Black Mountain site located in the Mimbres region. The research will allow for a more detailed understanding of how the people at the site were interacting with others in the region during the dramatic social and demographic changes in post 1125 AD.
  • The College Professors of Distinction at CU-Arts and Sciences, have awarded Payson Sheets a College Scholar Award. This is a special honor for “scholarship and creative accomplishment and promise”.Payson plans to use the award to extend his sabbatical in Central America next year, hunting evidence of pre-Contact manioc cultivation.
  • Alicia Davis (PhD ’10) and Tim Craig (’08) are featured in The Chronicle of Higher Education in a recent article about anthropologists in non-academic careers.
  • The new Associate Director of the Global Studies Academic Program at CU-Boulder is Carol Conzelman (PhD ’07).  The position will involve teaching small seminars, facilitating local community engagement projects, mentoring students for Study Abroad and other international experiences, and taking students to Bolivia or Peru for service learning programs each summer.
  • Paul Shankman reviewed a recent biography of Claude Lévi-Strauss in the November 26th issue of Science magazine.
  • The 2011 Roy Chapman Andrews Society Distinguished Explorer Award will be presented to Steve Lekson in a ceremony on February 4, 2011 in Eaton Chapel on the Beloit College campus in Beloit, Wisconsin. He is the first archaeologist to receive this award which is sponsored by the Roy Chapman Andrews Society whose mission is to honor the legacy of one of the most celebrated explorers of the 20th century.
  • Richard Wilshusen (PhD ’91, Anthropology Lecturer) has been appointed as the Colorado State Archaeologist and Deputy State Historic Preservation Officer. He will also be a Visiting Scholar at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale for Spring 2011.
  • The keynote speaker for the European-based Association for Environmental Archaeology conference on “The Environment and Civilization” will be Payson Sheets. The conference will be held in Kyoto, Japan from November 30 to December 2, 2010. Payson will be presenting a paper on how ancient egalitarian, ranked and stratified societies in Mexico and Central America handled the massive stresses of explosive volcanic eruptions.
  • The mission of the Latin American Studies Center is to provide an institutional space for research, teaching, and discussion on Latin America at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Donna Goldstein is on the Steering Committee of this newly formed entity; Kate Fischer is the Assistant to the Director. For more information about the Center go to: http://www.colorado.edu/lasc/about.
  • Bert Covert has been named CU-Boulder’s 2010 Global Citizen of the Year. He will receive the award at an International Education Week reception on November 16, 2010.
  • Sandy Mielke, FAMSI web administrator, and Inga Calvin have posted Calvin’s research and rollout photographs on the web at http://research.famsi.org/rollouts/rollout_search.php. This fully-searchable database integrates archaeological information with images in order to facilitate scholarship.
  • Gerardo Gutierrez presented his new book on the Archaeology of the Ancient Province of Tlapa in the town hall of the indigenous municipality of Tlapa, Guerrero, Mexico on October 21, 2010, forging positive ties among the native communities of Guerrero, Mexico and the University of Colorado.
  • Dennis Van Gerven has been honored by the Alumni Association as one of three recipients of the 2010 Teacher Recognition Award. These awards are student-chosen awards for professors and have been a tradition since 1962. This is the fourth time students have selected Van Gerven for his excellence in teaching.
  • Dennis McGilvray and associate Michele Gamburd co-authored an article about the Sri Lanka tsunami research project in the October 2010 issue of Anthropology News. Their piece was included in a set on “Disaster Relief and Recovery”.
  • Amy Harrison-Levine, PhD student, has received an award from the Denver Zoo for her dissertation research regarding, “The Human-Nonhuman Primate Interface in Ha Giang Province, Vietnam”. Her research focuses on Tonkin snub-nosed monkeys living in the Khua Ca forest. This group represents the only known remaining viable population of these monkeys in the world.
  • CU Denver’s assistant professor of anthropology, Julien Riel-Salvatore, has done research into Neanderthals and has shown that they could adapt, innovate and evolve technology all on their own – read more.Cathy Cameron, an editor with the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, tells us that his work will be featured in the upcoming December 2010 issue.
  • “The Material Culture of Incipient Social Complexity in Pacific Coastal Mesoamerica: The Ceramics of ‘La Consentida’ ” was presented by Guy Hepp on October 2, 2010 at the Colorado Archaeological Society annual meeting in Gunnison.
  • A National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement Award has been given to Marni LaFleur for her research in Madagascar entitled: Testing the Energy Conservation Hypothesis for Female Dominance in Wild Ring-tailed Lemurs with Implications for the Evolution of Lemur Traits.
  • Paul Shankman has been invited to give the annual Distinguished Lecture in Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York this December 22. The topic will be the Mead-Freeman controversy.
  • In a recent issue of Museum Anthropology, Steve Lekson reflects on changing relations between museums and tribes over the years. The article is titled, “Commentary: My Adventures in Zuni—and Kykotsmovi and Window Rock and . . . ”  View online – scroll down to article.
  • Michelle Sauther’s research in Madagascar with partner Frank Cuozzo (PhD ’00) is highlighted in Popular Anthropology, a free online magazine dedicated to fostering a dialogue between anthropologists and the general public.
  • Graduate student, Michaela Howells, has won a National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement Grant for her study of, “The Impact of Globalization and Psychosocial Stress on Gestation Length and Pregnancy Outcomes on the Pacific Island of Tutuila”. Michaela will be shipping off to Polynesia soon to begin her research in earnest.
  • Gerardo Gutierrez during the Summer of 2010 presented copies of the Humboldt codices to the Native communities where they originated in Tlapa, Mexico. One of the goals of publishing the codices was to provide the communities who paid the tribute, and depicted the payments, with an historical record for their own keeping.
  • Arrested Histories: Tibet, the CIA, and Memories of a Forgotten War, authored by Carole McGranahan is hot off the press. Drawing on rich ethnographic and historical research, McGranahan tells the story of the Tibetan resistance and the social processes through which this history is made and unmade, and lived and forgotten in the present.
  • Kaifa Roland’s book on Cuba is also out and available from Oxford University Press. Cuban Color in Tourism and La Lucha describes the shifting intersections of race, class, sexuality, and belonging.
  • PhD student, Katy Putsavage, has received a grant from the New Mexico Archaeological Council for preliminary ceramic INAA (instrumental neutron activation analysis) studies.
  • The CU Museum of Natural History has been awarded two major grants that will promote collaboration with the Navajo Nation in documenting and caring for objects in the museum’s Anthropology collection as well as fostering learning opportunities at home and abroad. Jen Shannon will be actively involved in this endeavor.
  • A 2010 Goldstein Altman Graduate Research Award recipient, Rachel Fleming, is spending the summer in Bangalore. Rachel is exploring how issues are linked to ideas about gender though questions about the increasing professionalization of Indian women, the rise of the Indian middle class and its separation fom lower classes, and the place of right-wing Hinduism in a city that symbolizes a future vision of modern, globablized, and cosmopolitan India.
  • Paul Shankman’s The Trashing of Margaret Mead was reviewed in the May 28 edition of Science magazine http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/328/5982/1108-a by Robert A. LeVine, of the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University.
  • Hillmon’s Bones, the award-winning film produced by students in ATLAS of Dennis Van Gerven’s research into the identity of famously-disputed remains in Kansas, was an official selection at the 2010 Big Muddy Film Festival in Carbondale, Illinois.
  • A PhD candidate, Paul Sandberg, was awarded a Wenner-Gren Foundation Grant to aid his fieldwork research on “High Resolution Reconstruction of Early Life History Events in Archaeological Humans: A Biogeochemical Approach”. Paul will be off to England to launch his research late this summer.
  • Carla Jones has published an article in the latest American Anthropologist, “Better Women: The Cultural Politics of Gendered Expertise in Indonesia”.
  • Matt Sponheimer is on the team that made the very exciting recent discovery of what may be a new hominid species in South Africa. Australopithecus sediba “is at the point where we transition from an ape that walks on two legs to, effectively, us,” lead scientist Professor Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand told BBC News.
  • One of our rising stars, Rachel Fleming, is featured in the latest Inside CU e-zine, as she “turns the spotlight on South Asia”.
  • Payson Sheets is the Principal Investigator for a National Science Foundation grant in support of the project entitled “Living with the Dangers of Sudden Environmental Change”.
  • A chapter written by Gerardo Gutierrez entitled, “The Archaeology of a Native Map: the Lienzo of Chiepetlan 1”, can be found in a newly-released book published by the University of Guerrero and the Secretary of Indigenous Affairs of the State of Guerrero.
  • Dennis McGilvray has co-edited a new book out from Routledge: Tsunami Recovery in Sri Lanka: Ethnic and Regional Dimensions. The book is framed . . . to illustrate how disaster relief unfolded in a culturally pluralistic political landscape.
  • The National Science Foundation has requested that Payson Sheets write a special report of his research on manioc cultivation by the ancient Maya. They consider his work to be, “highly successful, with potentially significant applications.”
  • On January 29, 2010, Payson Sheets gave a lecture at Columbia University entitled, “The Unintended Consequences of an Ancient Religious Conversion in Costa Rica”. This lecture is co-sponsored by the Archaeological Institute of America.
  • Inga Calvin (PhD ’06, Lecturer UCB) gave a lecture to the Precolumbian Society at the University of Pennsylvania of Archaeology and Anthropology on January 9. Calvin’s lecture was entitled “Text, Pseudo-Text,and Context: A Study of Classic Period Maya Ceramic Inscriptions.”
  • Gerardo Gutierrez’ work on the Humboldt and Azoyu Codices has been published in a remarkable bilingual edition with a 25-foot color pullout facsimile of the fragments: Códice Humboldt Fragmento 1 (Ms.amer.2) y Códice Azoyú 2 Reverso: Nómina de tributos de Tlapa y su provincial al Imperio Mexicano. Bilingual (Spanish-English) edition. Mexico: CIESAS and Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz. The translation was done by his wife, Dr. Mary Pye. This is the only surviving tax record of all the tribute paid to the Aztec empire by one of their subject provinces.
  • Craig Lee (PhD ’07, Anthropology Lecturer 2010) will be featured in a National Geographic special airing on January 28, 2010. The series is called “Naked Science” and the episode is called “Surviving Ancient Alaska”. Lee had a film crew follow him while he was looking for archaeological material in association with melting ice patches in Denali National Park, Alaska. For more details see:http://instaar.colorado.edu./research/science_spotlights.html#saa .

  • Mark Mitchell, PhD candidate, is co-editor of a newly published volume from the University of Arizona Press entitled Across a Great Divide; Continuity and Change in Native North American Societies, 1400-1900. Richard Wilshusen (PhD ’91) is a contributing author.
  • Cathy Cameron’s Chaco and After book was chosen by the Pima County Public Library as a “Southwest Book of the Year”. Her book was among 5 chosen from a list of 250. Pima County has an extensive library system that includes Tucson.
  • The CU College Scholar Award has recently been presented to Art Joyce. The College Professors of Distinction recommended Art for this award based on Art’s meritorious scholarship and creative accomplishments and promise.
  • Russ McGoodwin was the keynote speaker at, “Anthropology of Biodiversity and Human Life Worlds,” which took place in Jevnaker, Norway, December 1-3. The workshop explored how anthropology could play a greater role in research regarding worldwide biodiversity loss and environmental degradation.
  • A new book hot off the press: Mixtecs, Zapotecs, and Chatinos; Ancient Peoples of Southern Mexico, by Art Joyce, ” . . . examines the origins, history, and interrelationships of the civilizations that arose and flourished in Oaxaca . . . with compelling illustrations, photographs, and line drawings of various archaeological sites and artifacts.” Released December 2009.
  • Art Joyce has been awarded a research grant from the National Science Foundation for the project Collaborative Research: Reconstructing Prehistoric Land use Patterns in the Lower Río Verde Valley, Oaxaca,Mexico; Project RVEAL. The project involves collaborations with scholars from Cornell University and the Rochester Institute of Technology.
  • Warren Hern, Professor Adjunct, has authored a paper entitled, “Shipibo hunting and the overkill hypothesis,” published in the latest issue of Tipiti, Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America (SALSA). (2007)5(2):122-136. Dr. Hern’s photo of a Shipibo hunter appears on the cover of the new issue.
  • Art Joyce gave the keynote address on October 29 at the First Coloquio Internacional sobre la Mixteca (International Colloquium on the Mixteca) sponsored by the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS). His talk was entitled El Posclásico en la Mixteca de la Costa. De la caída de Río Viejo hasta la Conquista española (The Postclassic in the Mixteca de la Costa from the Fall of Río Viejo to the Spanish Conquest).
  • The Tibet Film Festival sponsored by Carole McGranahan’s ANTH 1105 class is featured with a video clip and story in the Colorado Daily.
  • Shannon Gray (MBA/MA ’06) has been hired as the Director of Research for North Star Destination Strategies. North Star Destination Strategies specializes in Community and City Branding. Shannon will facilitate North Star’s recent expansion of research services by improving current offerings and developing new research products that fill community needs.
  • Russ McGoodwin has been invited to participate in a conference in Norway sponsored by the Department of Social Anthropology at the University in Oslo this December. The focus is to explore ways of promoting anthropological studies related to biological diversity as a prioritized field of research.
  • Marc Levine (PhD ’07, Instructor UCB Anthropology) is curator of the Genghis Khan exhibit now showing at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science and running through February 7, 2010. In an interview with the Denver Post, he revealed some surprising cultural facts about the infamous Mongol’s empire.
  • At the Fall Convocation Awards Ceremony on October 14, Carole McGranahan was one of the recipients of the 2009 Provost Faculty Achievement Award for her article, “Truth, Fear, and Lies: Exile Politics and Arrested Histories of the Tibetan Resistance,” published in the Cultural Anthropology Journal.
  • Arthur Joyce gave a keynote talk on September 2 at the fifth Mesa Redonda de Monte Albán entitled Monte Albán como encrucijada simbólica y material en la Antigua Oaxaca. The talk included a new theory concerning the collapse of the Monte Albán polity that received press coverage in Mexico.
  • Preliminary research by a University of Colorado at Boulder archaeology team, led by Steve Lekson, suggests that elite priests living in a spiritual outpost built high on a southwestern Colorado mountain ridge a thousand years ago, likely had their meals catered by commoners living in the valley below. To read more: http://colorado.edu/news/r/d8e411224278f6967ab333307e9a3fde.html .
  • The Hillmon Case: Associate Professor of Film Studies Ernesto Acevedo-Munoz, Marianne “Mimi” Wesson from the School of Law and Dennis Van Gerven of Anthropology, were recently on site at the Oak Hill Cemetery in Lawrence Kansas to film the exhumation of 19th century remains and perhaps solve a mystery over a century old. For more exciting details:http://www.colorado.edu/insidecu/editions/2009/7-14/story3.html.
  • U.S. Rep. John Salazar recently visited with the CU team at the Chimney Rock Archaeological Area. Salazar helped to secure federal funding to preserve the Chimney Rock site. The CU-Boulder team of five graduate students is led by Steve Lekson and doctoral student Brenda Todd. For more details about the visit, see colorado.edu/news. For more information about the CU team’s excavation project at Chimney Rock, see an article in the Pagosa Springs Sun Newspaper.
  • Bert Covert and Dr. Hoang Minh Duc of the Center for Biodiversity and Development received an International Research Collaboration Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Their project is titled: “Behavioral Ecology of Sympatric Colobines: Niche Partitioning at Ta Kou and Nui Ong Nature Reserves”!
  • The Association for Asian Studies conference panel on “Crucible of Conflict: Ethnic and Religious Tensions in Eastern Sri Lanka” was organized by Dennis McGilvray in Chicago on March 28, 2009. Members included Timmo Gaasbeek (Wangeningen University, Netherlands), K. Tudor Silva (Peradeniya University, Sri Lanka), Dennis McGilvray (University of Colorado at Boulder), Jonathan Spencer (Edinburgh University, Scotland), Shahul Hasbullah (Peradeniya University, Sri Lanka), and Bart Klem (University of Zurich, Switzerland).
  • The Alexander von Humboldt Research Award has been given to Terry McCabe. This award is “granted in recognition of a researcher’s entire achievements to date . . . who have had significant impact on their own discipline and who are expected to continue producing cutting-edge achievments in the future.” It is one of the most prestigious research awards given by the German government. This award will allow him to collaborate with researchers at Cologne on a project examining complexity in the African savannas.
  • CU Ethnographers study the Global Ummah. Carla Jones and Dennis McGilvray are members of an interdisciplinary research team exploring the cultural diversity of Muslim communities and their conceptions of global Islamic identity.
  • Anthropology Professor Douglas Bamforth led a study that is the first to identify protein residue from extinct camels on North American stone tools and only the second to identify horse protein residue on a Clovis-age tool. More on the biochemical analysis of a rare Clovis-era stone tool cache recently unearthed in the city limits of Boulder can be found by visitinghttp://www.colorado.edu/news/r/1124c0243883c267a7759da4bc4a2902.html .
  • Doctoral student Mark Mitchell has another publication to his credit: “A Unique Northern Plains Ceramic Vessel in the Museum’s Lewis and Clark Collection”, Expedition 50:3, 45-47.

  • Payson Sheets and Tom Sever (PhD ’90) had their satellite archaeology featured again recently in Cosmos; the Science of Everything magazine, Australia’s premier science journal.
  • Mark Mitchell is the editor of a report just published by the PaleoCultural Research Group entitled Geophysical Survey and Test Excavation during 2006 at Larson Village, Burleigh County, North Dakota. Mark’s latest contribution to the premier journal American Antiquity is his article “Communities Make Theory: A Response to Bleed and Roper”. Volume 72(4):789-792.
  • Crystal Watson is a new editorial intern for Cultural Anthropology, the journal of the Society for Cultural Anthropology. As an editorial intern she will be working under editors Kim and Mike Fortun, focusing on expanding the journal’s readership and fostering dialogue among SCA members. Her focus will be on articles and authors writing within the themes of Culture and Theory, and Religion.
  • Arthur Joyce just received word that, as part of a collaborative team, he was awarded a $228,000 research grant from NASA: Hyper- and Multi-spectral Satellite Imagery and the Ecology of State Formation and Complex Societies (He is a co-PI with a team from the Rochester Institute of Technology). This research grant was a direct result of his 2007 Innovative Seed Grant award from CU. The PI on the NASA grant, William Middleton, is a collaborator on Art’s IGP project and the NASA grant is for remote sensing studies that will enhance the field research supported by his IGP.
  • Carole McGranahan has been widely consulted by international media in recent weeks on the current unrest in Tibet. Included among them was a request from Savage Minds, an anthropology blog, to contribute a piece on the situation. In other news, she was featured in DAK; The Newsletter of the American Institute of Indian Studies, in their Winter 2008 (Number 16) edition.
  • Bert Covert has been awarded a Faculty Fellowship for the 2008/2009 academic year for a project titled, “Conservation and Ecology of the Tonkin Snub-nosed Monkey.” He has also been awarded a National Science Foundation Grant for 2008.
  • Errin Weller is this year’s recipient of the Earl Morris award in archaeology.
  • Chris Dixon and Adam Blanford gave excellent presentations at the Society for American Archaeology annual meeting in Vancouver, Canada last Thursday. Chris Dixon gave a paper on Manioc: A New Discovery in the Classic Period Agriculture of Ceren, El Salvador, and Adam Blanford presented a paper on Maize Agricultural Fields and Surveying to the South of Ceren.Payson Sheets, who organized the symposium and gave the introductory paper, was proud of how well they did.
  • Dennis McGilvray’s long-awaited work on the conflict in Sri Lanka is off the press at last. The Crucible of Conflict: Tamil and Muslim Society on the East Coast of Sri Lanka “… is an ethnographic and historical study of Hindu castes, matrilineal family structure, popular religious traditions, and ethnic conflict. It is also the first full-length ethnography of Sri Lanka’s east coast, an area that suffered heavily in the 2004 tsunami and that is of vital significance to the political future of the island nation…McGilvray argues that any long-term resolution of the ethnic conflict [in Sri Lanka] must accommodate this region, in which Sinhalese Buddhists, Tamil Hindus, and Tamil-speaking Muslims are each a significant share of the population…” ISBN 978-0-8223-4161-1 from Duke University Press.
  • Russ McGoodwin has been invited to present an expert paper at the 4th Global Conference on Oceans, Coast, and Islands in Hanoi this week. “Advancing Ecosystem Management and Integrated Coastal and Ocean Management by 2010 in the Context of Climate Change”, is hosted by the Government of Vietnam, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development and will be attended by bigwig policy-makers from all over the globe.
  • Jakob Sedig, Kathryn Olszowy, Marni LaFleur, James Millette, Emily Mertz, and Colleen Scanlan Lyons have all won 2008 Beverly Sears Graduate Student Grant Awards.
  • Payson Sheets has won an $86,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for his manioc bed excavations at Cerén.
  • Sarah Taylor published a morsel in the latest Anthropology News. “Let Me See Your Grill; Dental Modification in the Past and Present” surveys dental beautification across cultures and time, including candy “Grillz” in local video stores and inlays she encountered during her own fieldwork in Oaxaca, Mexico. Anthropology News 49(4):54-55. 
  • Payson Sheets has been named a College Professor of Distinction by the College of Arts and Sciences. The honorific title “College Professor of Distinction” is reserved for scholars and artists of national and international distinction who are also recognized by their College peers as teachers and colleagues of exceptional talent. Sheets joins an elite group of 12 professors named for this title since it was instituted in 2005. Information regarding the title and the selection process is on the web at:
    http://artsandsciences.colorado.edu/facultystaff/
  • Pat Lawrence has accepted a consultant position with the United Nations Equal Access to Justice Program in Sri Lanka for the next 6 months. She’ll be working with war victims, refugees, and other vulnerable populations in this violence-torn region.
  • Jessica Lee and Jonathan O’Brien have each won Fulbright awards for 2008. Jessica will take her Fulbright to Tanzania to conduct dissertation research examining how a deaf-run NGO is facilitating the growth of a culturally deaf community. Jonathan is off to Vietnam to study the ecology and conservation of an endangered primate, the Black-shanked Douc, in Cat Tien National Park and has further feathered his nest with a FLAS scholarship to study Vietnamese language.
  • Michelle Sauther and Matt Sponheimer have received a $28,000 Innovative Grant Program (IGP) grant for their project “Using Biogeochemistry to Assess Human-Induced Ecological Disequilibrium in Madagascar”.
  • Donna Goldstein is the Principal Investigator on a new (2007-2010) National Science Foundation grant titled, “Global, National and Local Articulations: The Case of Pharmaceutical Policies in Argentina and Mexico”. The research project is both collaborative and interdisciplinary and is exploring questions of intellectual property, regulation, and human rights as they affect access to HIV/AIDS drugs in Latin America.
  • Payson Sheets received an $86,252 NSF grant last week for his Jan-March field season at the Cerén site in El Salvador, to excavate the magnificently preserved manioc fields. He was also awarded a $43,500 Innovative Research grant from the Graduate School for the planned research there in early 2009.
  • Russ McGoodwin was an invited participant at the 4th Global Forum Conference on Oceans, Coasts, and Islands, April 7-11, held in Hanoi, Vietnam. The Global Forum is the leading forum for high level policy dialogue on ocean issues.  The conference brought together 430 ocean and coastal leaders from around the world representing 71 countries, from all sectors including governments, intergovernmental and international organizations, NGO’s, the business community, and scientific institutions.  Invited to join the Fisheries and Aquaculture Working Group of the Global Forum last Fall, Russ authored a policy brief for the conference titled “Climate Change and Fisheries,” which was one among only nine policy briefs that were distributed to conference participants.
  • Nicole Smith has won a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation, which she will take advantage of while doing her fieldwork in Tanzania.
  • The National Science Foundation devoted a page to Matt Sponheimer’s work on their reality check website, Archaeology from Reel to Real. Learn more about Sponheimer’s work with strontium isotope analysis, where “X” Never, Ever Marks the Spot”. With NSF funding, Dr. Sponheimer and an international team of scientists from England, Germany, South Africa, and the United States have developed and applied new techniques to study the way ancient hominins moved across ancient landscapes. This knowledge is critical for testing a variety of hypotheses about human evolution.
  • Michaela Howells is a winner of the Brown/Ricketts/Udick Grant from the American Association of University Women.
  • Marnie Thomson garnered a pre-dissertation grant from the department and a FLAS grant for her summer studies in Kiswahili.
  • Jonathan O’Brien and Hoang Thach have won grants from Primate Conservation, Inc. for their studies of endangered primates in Vietnam.
  • Magda Stawkowski has been awarded a CARTSS Albert E. Smith grant for Social Science research on Sustainability, Security, and Survival in a New Nuclear Age by the Center to Advance Research and Teaching in the Social Science. The award was granted in support of her project: “Radioactive Knowledge: State Control of Scientific Information in Post-Soviet Kazakhstan.”
  • The Vice Chancellor for Research and Provost announced the award winners for the Second Annual Innovative Seed Grant Program (IGP). Anthropologists walked away with 40% of the awards, with winning proposals by Darna Dufour, Steve Lekson, Michelle Sauther, and Payson Sheets. “The awards provide up to $50,000 for research, scholarship, and creative works to UC-Boulder faculty that: involve new initiatives and take investigators in creative, and sometimes high-risk/reward directions; and have tangible payoffs in terms of future funding, scholarly or artistic impact, and development of new collaborations.”
  • Russ McGoodwin was a participant at the symposium, “Coping with Global Change in Marine Social-Ecological Systems,” which was held in Rome, Italy, July 8 – 11.  The symposium’s primary sponsors were Global Ocean Ecosystems Dynamics (GLOBEC), Eur-Oceans, and Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO/UN).  The registered participants included more than 218 scientists and academics from more than 51 countries.  Russ presented a paper titled “Building Adaptive Capacity in Fisheries Impacted by Global Change,” and was also an invited member of the symposium’s Distinguished Closing Panel.
  • Doug Bamforth is featured in CU’s online zine today, in an interview about his fieldschool: “Student Perspective: Hands on Learning at the Great Plains Archeology Field School. Students studying archeology at CU have a unique chance each summer to learn in the field at the full-credit Great Plains Archaeology Field School by surveying sites, finding new sites, excavating and processing recovered artifacts.”
  • Dennis McGilvray’s book has been featured in INSIDE CU, CU-Boulder’s online faculty/staff newsletter. Crucible of Conflict: Tamil and Muslim Society on the East Coast of Sri Lanka (Duke 2008), is an ethnographic and historical analysis of the island’s Tamil-speaking Hindu and Muslim communities in the midst of the Sri Lankan civil war with the LTTE Tamil Tigers.
  • Rachel Fleming, one of our graduate students, was among six students honored at a Chancellor’s Fellowship Reception October 23rd in the Koenig Alumni Center. Chancellor Peterson and Dean of the Graduate School, Stein Sture, gave personal recognition to the 2007 and 2008 winners of the most prestigious fellowship awarded from the Boulder campus. The Chancellor’s Fellows receive full support from the Graduate School for two years of graduate study. Fleming is currently doing research in cultural anthropology, with a focus on the world music industry and its ties with local development projects in Latin America.
  • Terry McCabe has been awarded a CU Faculty Fellowship for 2009-2010. The title of the project is: Complexity and Resilience in the Rangelands of Northern Tanzania. The project is designed to bring together 20 years of research among pastoral and agro-pastoral people in northern Tanzania within the emerging framework of resilience and complexity for coupled social/ecological systems. The end product will certainly be a set of articles and possibly a book.
  • Dr. Gerardo Gutiérrez will join our archaeology faculty in the fall of 2009. He is coming to us from a tenured research position at the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social in Mexico City where he has worked for the last four years. Gerardo has an MA in urban studies from El Colegio de México and earned his PhD in anthropology in 2002 from the Pennsylvania State University. In 2002-2003, he held a prestigious post-doctoral fellowship at Dumbarton Oaks. Gerardo’s research is focused on the archaeology, ethnohistory, and human ecology of prehispanic and early colonial peoples of Mexico. He is currently directing two research projects. One is focused on the politics and ecology of the late prehispanic and early colonial period Tlapa-Tlachinollan Kingdom of eastern Guerrero. He is investigating how this multi-ethnic polity responded to two successive waves of imperial conquest in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries: the first at the hands of the Aztecs and, several decades later, with the arrival of the Spanish. Gerardo is also examining the complex large-scale irrigation systems built by the peoples of eastern Guerrero. His research combines archaeological survey and excavation with studies of the Tlapanec codices and GIS based analyses of settlement and landscape. The second project is a study of the impact of Hurricane Stan on archaeological sites and landscapes in Mazatán, Chiapas, México. He uses the results of this study to examine how ancient hurricanes might have impacted human populations in the region. Gerardo has received numerous grants for his research, including from the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, the New World Archaeological Foundation, and the Fulbright Foundation. He has numerous publications on his research, including a forthcoming book on the codical history of Tlapa.
  • Our department had a significant presence at this year’s American Anthropological Association meeting. Papers and panels were given by faculty members Darna Dufour, Donna Goldstein (two), Carla Jones (two), Terry McCabe, Carole McGranahan (two), L. Kaifa Roland (two), Paul Shankman and Kira Hall (two). Graduate student papers and panels were given by Alicia Davis, Ricardo Moreno-Contro, Chris Morris, Colleen Scanlan-Lyons (two), Carey Scheerer, Magda Stawkowski and Carlos Torres. Recent department graduates giving papers were Mark Calamia, Carol Conzelman, Laura DeLuca (two), Mark Levine, Joanna Mishtal and Rui Murrieta. Other CU graduate students spotted in the corridors were Porter Bourie, Kate Fischer, Rachel Fleming, Meryleen Mena, Margaret Shugart, Casey Sloan and Marnie Thomson. You can find media coverage of the discussion Mothering in the Field by clicking here.
  • Patricia Lawrence, our senior Instructor who teaches courses for Anthropology, Peace and Conflict Studies, and the Baker RAP, has accepted a full-time position with a German NGO (Arbeiter Samariter Bund) overseeing their social service projects in Sri Lanka. Among these ASB-funded projects is the Children’s Butterfly Peace Garden in Batticaloa, where Pat has frequently served as a consultant in the past. Pat will take up her new appointment in Sri Lanka on January 1, 2009.
  • Art Joyce was awarded a CARTSS Grant to support archaeological research on the origins, development, and collapse of state societies in the lower Río Verde Valley on the Pacific coast of Oaxaca, Mexico. He is co-directing the project with CU alum, Stacy Barber (Assistant Professor at the University of Central Florida). The project will consist of excavations on the acropolis at the regional political center of Río Viejo along with the analysis of artifacts and architecture. The project is a feasibility study to identify locations for large-scale excavations in subsequent field seasons.

  • Bert Covert won a $20,000 award from the Margot March Biodiversity Foundation to continue his research in Conservation of the Critically Endangered Tonkin Snub-nosed Monkey in the Khau Ca Area of Ha Giang Province, Vietnam.
  • Payson Sheets will be put to work by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, now that he’s a fellow, serving a three-year term on the Electorate Nominating Committee.
  • Alice Mossie Brues, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, died in her sleep on January 14, 2007. Alice was the second woman in the USA to earn a PhD with a specialization in physical anthropology. She is well known for her work in human variation and genetics, and especially for her pioneering work in computer simulations of genetic interactions among human populations.
  • Payson Sheets’ proposal to National Geographic was approved, so he will be going to Ceren, El Salvador, for geophysical research in May and June with grad students Adam Blanford and Chris Dixon, a few DU grad students, plus Larry Conyers and his ground-penetrating radar equipment. They will be imaging the ancient agricultural fields–maize ridges mostly–through 3-4 meters of volcanic ash, looking for patterns and variation, and anomalies that could be very interesting items.
  • Russ McGoodwin has published a lengthy article in the journal, Marine Policy 31(2007) 40-55, “Effects of Climatic Variability on Three Fishing Economies in High-Latitude Regions:  Implications for Fisheries Policies.”   Field research was conducted in an Icelandic fishing community, as well as in several indigenous communities in Alaska, exploring the implications of climatic variability and “global warming” for these regions’ fisheries policies.
  • Michelle Sauther won a Bronze Award in the 2007 Council for Advancement and Support of Education District VI website design awards competition. The site was judged on the design and content in competition with offerings from several other Midwest universities.
  • Heather Williams won a generous grant supplement from the National Institute of Health for her PhD research.
  • Carol Conzelman published an article in the February 8th edition of the NACLA Journal of The North American Congress on Latin America entitled, “Yungas Coca Growers Seek Industrialization but Split on Legalization”.
  • Congratulations to this year’s winners of the Anthropology Pre-dissertation/Pre-thesis Awards: Jamie Dubendorf, Jessica Hedgepeth, Michaela Howells, Sarah Jennings, Emily Mertz, Jonathan O’Brien, Brenda Todd and Heather Williams. Their excellent proposals have been granted cash awards to support development of their research and to help them obtain external funding.
  • Payson Sheets and a colleague at Northwestern University, Cynthia Robin, have been awarded a grant from the Amerind Foundation in Arizona, as well as permission to hold an Advanced Seminar at their facility, probably in April of 2008.  It will focus on commoner agency and how that can affect societal developments.  Art Joyce is one of nine invited participants.
  • Donna Goldstein has been awarded an Eaton Faculty Award from the Center for Humanities & Arts for her book, Laughter Out Of Place: Race, Class, Violence, and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown (U Calif Press 2003). This is a newly established award funded by Leslie & Woody Eaton, after whom the Humanities Building was named, and it provides a $1500 prize.
  • Mark Mitchell has been selected to receive the Earl Morris Award in Archaeology for his outstanding PhD work.
  • Sarah Taylor won a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, so she can relax into her to finish her stable isotope and microwear study of pre-Conquest diet and agriculture in the Lower Rio Verde Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico and whatever doctoral research she chooses from there.
  • Colleen Scanlan-Lyons won a Verona Walker Award through the Beverly Sears foundation for her research in Brazil.
  • Crystal Watson has been awarded a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship.
  • Kunga Lama has won an Ashby Prize from the Environment and Planning Journal A, which concentrates on spatial organization and restructuring of cities and regions throughout the globe, for publication of his paper “Hip-hop gangsta or most deserving of victims? Transnational migrant identities and the paradox of Tibetan racialization in the USA”. The prize includes cash for Kunga and his co-author, Emily Yeh.
  • James Dixon received the 2007 Professional Achievement Award by the Alaska Anthropological Association.  The award will be presented at the Association’s annual meeting in Anchorage, Alaska in March 2008.
  • Michaela Howells won a William H. Burt award from the CU Museum in support of her primate research.
  • Crystal Watson’s FLAS fellowship is for both summer and the academic year. This summer she will attend the American Institute of Indian Studies in Jaipur, India, where she’ll live with a host family and study intensive intermediate Hindi for 11 weeks. Next year, she’ll use her FLAS to continue her study of Hindi, her research area of South Asia, and Hindu and Islamic religious practices and beliefs.
  • Carla Jones has been awarded a CARTSS Scholar Fund grant of $4000 to conduct fieldwork in Indonesia this summer for her current project, “Flexible Piety: Middle Class Consumption and Islamic Values in Urban Indonesia.”
  • The following individuals have been selected from our department to receive a Beverly Sears Small Grant award. From among a highly competitive field of worthy project proposals, special recognition goes to: Colleen Scanlan-Lyons, Michaela Howells, Emily Mertz, Jessica Hedgepeth, Sarah Taylor, and Zonna Barnes.
  • Our winners of this year’s Walker Van Riper Awards are Jamie Dubendorf, Michaela Howells, Jessica Hedgepeth, Jonathan O’Brien, Emily Mertz and Brenda Todd.
  • Robert Hackenberg, Professor Emeritus of the CU Department of Anthropology, passed away last weekend. After 40 years of association with our department, he remained an active researcher for the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology (BARA) at the University of Arizona in Tucson. His research and advocacy emphasized the health consequences of culture change among non-Western peoples in Southeast Asia, Central America, and the American Southwest. He will be sorely missed.
  • Emily Mertz garnered a generous award from the St. Louis Zoo Wildcare Center for Lemur Conservation for her fieldwork in Madagascar this summer.
  • Jessica Hedgepeth, Chris Dixon, Brenda Todd and new Anthropology graduate admit, Katy Putsavage, all won Alice Hamilton Scholarship awards in support of their archaeological fieldwork in Oaxaca, Ceren, Cahokia, and Mimbres, respectively.
  • Jonathan O’Brien and Emily Mertz have received William H. Burt Awards.
  • Magda Stawkowski has won a full-ride FLAS scholarship for the Summer Workshop in Slavic, East European and Central Asian Languages at Indiana University to study Kazakh. FLAS also awarded a full ride scholarship to Nicole Smith to study Swahili at SCALI, the Summer Cooperative African Language Institute, being held at the University of Illinois this summer.
  • Patricia Lawrence received the Peace and Conflict Studies Faculty Award at the year end reception and celebration on Tuesday, May 1, 2007. She was honored for making a significant contribution to PACS’s mission through her teaching and influence on the expansion of the student body enrolled in the Peace and Conflict Studies’ Program, for her scholarly and humanitarian work in Sri Lanka’s violent conflict, for her publications in the field of peace studies, and for participating in community and international activities that advance peace.
  • Michelle Sauther has recently been awarded a Margot Marsh Biodiversity Foundation award of $10,000 to study introduced mammal predation of wild lemurs at her field site in Madagascar.
  • Mark Mitchell, Curt Nepstad-Thornberry and Doug Bamforth, have just published chapters in the book Plains Village Archaeology; Bison-hunting Farmers in the Central and Northern Plains, Ahler S and Kay M, Eds. Mark’s contribution to this University of Utah Press publication is entitled “Conflict and Cooperation in the Northern Middle Missouri, A.D. 1450-1650,” while “The Shifting Social Landscape of the Fifteenth-century Middle Missouri Region” was published by the cooperative pen of Curt and Doug.
  • Carole McGranahan is pleased to announce that her volume Imperial Formations, edited with Ann Stoler and Peter Perdue, was just released by SAR Press. “The contributors to this volume critique and abandon the limiting assumption that the European colonialism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can be taken as the representative form of imperialism. Recasting the study of imperial governance, forms of sovereignty, and the imperial state, the authors pay close attention to non-European empires and the active trade in ideas, practices, and technologies among empires, as well as between metropolitan regions and far-flung colonies. The Ottoman, Russian, Chinese, Spanish, and Japanese empires provide provocative case studies that challenge the temporal and conceptual framework within which colonial studies usually operates.”
  • Russ McGoodwin has published a lengthy review article in Ocean and Coastal Management. The article summarizes the most important recent discourses about fisheries-governance policy, while suggesting that two books recently published by Amsterdam University Press – Fish for Life, and Interactive Fisheries Governance – constitute significant advances in fisheries-governance and policy theory.
  • Patricia Lawrence has a book hot off the press. Women and the Contested State: Religion, Violence, and Agency in South and Southeast Asia was co-edited with Monique Skidmore for the University of Notre Dame Press. In Chapter 5, Pat details “The Watch of Tamil Women: Women’s Acts in a Transitional Warscape”.
  • Christine Dixon has accepted a Lecturer position for the spring semester at St. Mary’s College of California. She’ll be teaching an Introduction to Cultural Anthropology course and an upper division Mesoamerica course.
  • Douglas Bamforth’s edited volume, The Allen Site; A Paleoindian Camp in Southwestern Nebraska, is fresh off the University of New Mexico Press. The Allen Site in southwestern Nebraska has nurtured the interest of archaeologists and paleontologists with abundant signs of a long history of human, animal, and environmental activity. Doug “…focuses primarily on Paleoindian land use represented by the Allen Site and the adjacent smaller sites collectively known as the Medicine Creek Paleoindian sites.
  • Congratulations to Sarah Taylor on the publication of her article, “To sip or not to sip: the potential health risks and benefits of coffee drinking”. Sarah R. Taylor and Barbara Demmig-Adams [EBIO].Nutrition and Food Science 37:6 pp. 406-418.
  • Bert Covert has been awarded a Faculty Fellowship for the 2008/09 academic year for a project titled “Conservation and ecology of the Tonkin-snub nosed monkey.”  He also has been award a National Science Foundation Grant of $55,000 for 2008.  The NSF grant is titled “Collaborative Research: Conservation and Ecology of the Tonkin Snub-nosed Monkey at Khau Ca, Ha Giang Province, Vietnam.”

  • Matt Sponheimer garnered a grant from the L.S.B. Leakey Foundation in support of his research project ‘Using Strontium Isotopes to Investigate Land Use at Olduvai Gorge’.
  • Carole McGranahan has won a Center for Asian Studies Course Development Award for her Explorations course on Tibet. The Freeman Foundation award is designed to increase access to Asian studies courses and the number of students who learn about Asia in university classrooms.
  • Inga Calvin has been named by the Archaeology faculty to receive the Earl Morris Award in recognition of her outstanding graduate work. The award is endowed by the family of the late Earl Morris, who built the CU Museum’s anthropological collections from 1913–1956.
  • Errin Weller has received a National Science Foundation doctoral research improvement grant for some $12,000 for remote sensing of Maya sites.
  • Aimee Garza published an article in the Bilingual Research Journal, entitled ‘Hegemonic Multiculturalism: English Immersion, Ideology, and Subtractive Schooling’ in which she addresses the ‘…dissonance between the ideology of multiculturalism and…a…school’s pervasive assimilation agenda…’
  • Jessica Lee and Emily Mertz have won full ride FLAS scholarships with stipends to attend the Summer Cooperative African Language Institute at Indiana University. Jessica will study Swahili and Emily will study Malagasy.
  • David Hoffman has been hired as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environment, Peace and Security: Natural Resources and Sustainable Development Programme at the University for Peace in Ciudad Colon, Costa Rica. He will be teaching courses on conservation, coastal resources, and sustainable tourism for the 2006-2007 academic year.
  • Barbara Piperata has been hired as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Anthropology at The Ohio State University.
  • Michelle Butler has accepted a Dean’s Distinguished Fellowship for her PhD program at the University of California at Riverside.
  • Errin Weller has won an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant for her research in ‘Remote Sensing and the Late Classic (AD 650-850) Maya Utilization of Bajos (Seasonal Swamps) at Tikal and Yaxha Peten, Guatemala’. She is working with remote sensing specialists in NASA to explore the ancient use of seasonal swamps called ‘bajos’ to see if they were used for agriculture or other functions in the tropical lowlands of northeastern Guatemala.
  • Craig Lee has published an article in the most recent issue of Southwestern Lore, journal of the Colorado Archaeological Society. (Lee, Craig M., James B. Benedict, and Jess B. Lee.’Ice Patches and Remant Glaciers.’  Southwestern Lore Vol. 72 No. 1, 2006.)
  • Donna Goldstein was one of four faculty chosen as a Fellow to participate in next year’s (2006-7) Center for Humanities and Arts year-long seminar titled, “Reaping Profits, Reckoning Loss.”  The fellows will meet together in a year-long seminar and present the results of their work in a Spring 2007 Colloquium.  Goldstein will contribute to the seminar by presenting her research on pharmaceutical politics in Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil.
  • Krista Fish has added a grant to her list of winnings: The Sigma Xi Grant-in-aid-of Research.
  • Payson Sheets just received notice that he has been awarded a CARTSS grant for fieldwork in Costa Rica this summer. He and some students and some NASA remote sensing scientists will be walking and field verifying some linear anomalies that they have detected near the Cutris chiefdom. Sheets thinks many will turn out to be constructed ritual entryways and roads between communities.
  • Steve Lekson had two books published in April.  The first, The Archaeology of Chaco Canyon: An Eleventh-Century Pueblo Region Center, is an edited volume published by the School of American Research Press.  It is the product of 10 years of synthesis of the National Park Service’s Chaco Research Project.  His second book, Archaeology of the Mimbres Region, Southwestern New Mexico, U.S.A.,is a single-authored volume published by the British Archaeological Reports International Series.  This is the result of his work in the Mimbres region early in his career.
  • Michelle Sauther has received a CRCW grant to investigate the biology of ring-tailed lemurs living in a spiny forest in Madagascar called Tsimanompetsotsa. This new work will compare this data with information from her long-term gallery forest site of Beza Mahafaly to better understand how habitat affects dental attrition and health.
  • David Hoffman has just published Dispatches from the Field; neophyte ethnographers in a changing world. David co-edited this volume of ‘provocative essays… penned by advanced graduate students amidst their dissertation fieldwork…as a window into the complexities of being an ethnographer.’ David contributed a chapter, as did Carol Conzelman.
  • Congratulations to this year’s winners of Walker Van Riper Awards: Tim Craig, Jamie Dubendorf, Aimee Garza, and Carey Scheerer. And to winners of Burt Fund Awards: Meegan Anderson, Krista Fish, Jessica Lee, Jim Millette, Mark Mitchell, Niki Osum, Paul Sandberg, and Sarah Taylor.
  • Inga Calvin has landed a position for Fall at CU Denver, teaching Introduction to Archaeology. She will also continue teaching for the Academy for Lifelong Learning.
  • Courtney Lee has won a stipend to pursue her doctoral work in medical anthropology in the University of Colorado Health and Behavioral Sciences program.
  • The American Museum of Natural History is currently highlighting the work of Michelle Sauther. She is featured in the new AMNH video ‘Lemurs of Madagascar: Surviving on an Island of Change’ which will be playing in the New York museum’s Hall of Biodiversity for the next six months.
  • Jessica Hedgepeth received the Sigma XI Grant-in-Aid grant for Master’s thesis research this summer.
  • Dennis Van Gerven has won the Student Organization for Alumni Relations Teacher Recognition Award for a second time! The SOAR is the only student-awarded recognition for excellence in teaching at CU, and Dennis’ huge undergraduate class has been a regular hit with them.
  • Mark Mitchell has published a report in the prestigious journal American Antiquity entitled: ‘Research Traditions, Public Policy, and the Underdevelopment of Theory in Plains Archeology: Tracing the Legacy of the Missouri Basin Project’.
  • Kudos to the winners of the 2006 Alice Hamilton Scholarship from the Colorado Archaeological Society: Sarah Taylor, Jamie Forde, Zonna Barnes, and undergraduate major Diego Villalobos-Zamora.
  • Joanna Mishtal has won a two-year Charlotte Ellertson Social Science Postdoctoral Fellowship in Abortion and Reproductive Health at the Columbia University School of Public Health in New York. She will conduct two years’ research on Reproductive Rights Advocacy beginning in September, right after defending her dissertation.
  • Kunga Lama has published an article in the May edition of Environment and Planning A: “Hip-hop gangsta or most deserving of victims? Transnational migrant identities and the paradox of Tibetan racialization in the USA.”
  • Congratulations to our newly-elected Chair, Dennis McGilvray, a nd a huge round of appreciation to Darna Dufour for all the hard work and exceptional organization that she has devoted to our cause. We offer them both high hopes and good wishes on the next lap of their professional adventures. Our best wishes, also, to Doug Bamforth, who will be our Graduate Director, and Cathy Cameron, our just-selected Undergraduate Director for academic years 2006-2008.
  • Bert Covert has been in Hanoi co-hosting the first specialized training course on primate preservation in Vietnam. Vietnam is one of two countries in the world that have the highest numbers of primates facing extinction. While Madagascar has hundreds of experts joining hands to preserve primates, there are few in Vietnam. The three-week training course is being co-held by the Hanoi University for Natural Sciences and the International Conservation Organization.
  • Kunga Lama won a FLAS scholarship, which he’ll use to study Chinese–to complement his already existing fluency in Tibetan, Nepali, and Hindi!
  • Russ McGoodwin was the keynote speaker and a participant in a meeting last July in Amsterdam that explored governance theory for natural resources. The meeting was sponsored by the Marine Research Center of the University of Amsterdam, with support from the European Union.
  • James Dixon has received a Nation Science Foundation Grant entitled “Ice Patch Archeology” in the amount of $760,254 (including logistic support). This 5 year grant supports research focusing on archeology, ethnography, and climate change in relation to glaciers and perennial ice patches in the area of Alaska’s, Wrangell – St. Elias Mountains. Dixon will be presenting a paper in mid-September entitled “Early Holocene Maritime Adaptations on the Northwest Coast of North America: Excavations at On Your Knees Cave (49-PET-408)” in a symposium entitled “Harvesting the Sea” at the XVth meeting of the International Union of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences, Lisbon, Portugal.
  • Stephen Lekson has been selected by the Arizona Archaeological and Historical Society and Alta Mira Press as the new Acquisitions Editor for KIVA: The Journal of Southwestern Anthropology and History.
  • James Dixon is an invited keynote speaker at the IX Congress of the Association of Latin American Anthropology and Biology to be held October 11-14 in Minas Gerais, Brazil.  He will speak on ‘The Peopling of the Americas: The Coastal Route’.
  • Kaifa Roland has published her first article while in residence at CU:–Tourism and the Negrificacion of Cuban Identity—appears in the latest edition of Transforming Anthropology; Journal of the Association of Black Anthropologists, Volume 14, No. 2, pages 151-163. The article analyzes the ways contemporary understandings of skin color and foreign-ness in touristic interactions challenge revolutionary conceptualizations of what it means to be Cuban.
  • Jason Chuipka and James Loudon are two of the winners of CU’s Haskell-Houghtelin Fellowship. Colleen Scanlan-Lyons, Dana Whitelaw, and incoming graduate Michelle Trogdon have been awarded the Wilena Cartwright Fellowship for women scholars.
  • Payson Sheets just received the permissions from the Salvadorans in CONCULTURA and from Archaeology to do the geophysical research at the Ceren site this coming summer. Because Ceren is a World Heritage Site, it is difficult and complicated to get Salvadoran permission. Sheets has one National Geographic Society grant in hand, and another in process of evaluation, to support a fairly large field crew.
  • James Hester has just published a biography of the renowned Comanche artist, Rance Hood. Rance Hood, Mystic Painter focuses on his art and its place within Native American art, history and culture. University of New Mexico Press.
  • Carol Conzelman published another book chapter last summer: Conzelman, Caroline S. 2006. “El Movimiento Cocalero en los Yungas de Bolivia: Diferenciación Ideológica, Económica y Política.” En N. A. Robins, ed., Conflictos Políticos y Movimientos Sociales en Bolivia. La Paz:  Editorial Plural.
  • James Loudon, Michaela Howells et al., most notably Matt Sponheimer, have published an article in the latest Journal of Human Evolution, “Do ‘savanna’ chimpanzees consume C4 resources?” Volume 51:128-133.
  • Jamie Dubendorf, Magda Stawkowski, Carey Scheerer, and Kunga Lama have been selected from among our cultural anthropology ranks to receive this year’s Haskell-Houghtelin scholarship.
  • Shannon Gray, having passed her Comprehensive Exam in Anthropology, will be our first recipient of the Dual MA/MBA.
  • Jessica Lee published the first chapter in a new book, Women and Deafness; Double Visions, just out from Gallaudet University Press. Jessica contributed her studies on “Family Matters; Female Dynamics within Deaf Schools”. Pages 5-20.
  • Matt Sponheimer made a splash in science news publications around the world with his newly-developed technique for reconstructing how the diets of early hominids changed through time. His study suggests that Paranthropists did not likely become extinct because of their specialist dietary adaptations, as has been assumed.
  • Jack Kelso, Professor and Ombudsman Emeritus, was honored in a Presidential Session of the American Anthropological Association meetings this month in San Jose, for his life work in biological anthropology. An abstract for the discussion “Biocultural Anthropology: The Half-Century Legacy of Jack Kelso”, says this about him: “In one way or another, a large portion of today’s professional anthropologists have been touched by the work of Jack Kelso, whether or not they are aware of it. He has been at the forefront of discussions of ‘race’ and human variability, long arguing against the biological concept of race.”
  • Jim Dixon co-produced a video recently released by the Sealaska Heritage Institute. The 30 minute documentary titled “Kuwóot yas.éin—His Spirit is Looking out the From the Cave”, explores the partnership created between archaeologist and tribal members after human remains were discovered at an Alaskan site. The video is being used nationally as an educational tool exemplifying positive consultation and partnership under the Native American Graves Protections and Repatriation Act. Copies are available through Hidden Landscapes www.hiddenlandscape.com/Sealaska/Alaska.html with all proceeds going to the Sealaska scholarship fund.

  • Donna Goldstein has been awarded the Margaret Mead Award for this year, which will be presented to her in April at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology in Santa Fe.
  • Patricia Lawrence, our Peace and Conflict Studies specialist, will be in Sri Lanka for two weeks relieving exhausted volunteers there.
  • J. Terrence McCabe, associate professor of anthropology and a faculty research associate with the Institute of Behavioral Science at CU-Boulder, and Paul W. Leslie, professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, will receive $100,000 over 18 months for their study of “Alternative Consequences of Migration for Land Use and Conservation in Northern Tanzania.”
  • Graduate student Marc Levine has been awarded a National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement Grant and a grant from the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies (FAMSI) for his Ph.D. research on the political economy of the Late Postclassic (A.D. 1100-1521) Tututepec state on the Pacific Coast of Oaxaca, Mexico.
  • Art Joyce has been awarded an ACLS/SSRC/NEH International and Area Studies Fellowship for the 2005-2006 academic year.  The fellowship is in support of a book that he will be writing on the pre-Hispanic history of Oaxaca, Mexico.
  • Graduate student Isa Rodriguez-Soto has had her article, “Reinventando la democracia: Las luchas anti-ROTC después de Vieques” published in the periodical Universidad y (Anti)Militarismo: Historia, Luchas y Debates.
  • Graduate students Dana Whitelaw and Jamie Forde have been selected to receive Beverly Sears Graduate Student Grant awards.
  • Graduate student Craig Lee co-authored an articled entitled “The Emerging Archaeology of Glaciers and Ice Patches: Examples from Alaska’s Wrangell-St.Elias Nathional Park and Preserve” in the most recent issue of American Antiquity along with CU researchers William Manley and James Dixon.
  • Graduate student Colleen Scanlan-Lyons has captured a Fulbright to Brazil to the tune of $40,000 for 18 months of doctoral research.
  • A grant entitled “West Asia: A Critical Region for Undergraduate Education” submitted by Dennis McGilvray (P1) and Steve Snyder (Co-PI) to the Undergraduate International Studies and Foreign Languages Program of the US Dept. of Education has been awarded for two years with a budget of $159,000. The grant, which begins July 1, will provide funding for a full-time instructor in West Asian cultural geography and full-time instructor in Hindi language, plus faculty course-development grants, K-12 workshops, visiting speakers, and library materials.
  • Special congratulations to our Chair, Darna Dufour, who was invited to offer the Raymond Pearl Memorial Lecture at the annual convention of the Human Biology Association, in recognition of her major contributions to biocultural anthropology. Her award included an attractive onyx obelisk.
  • Graduate student Alicia Davis won a Fulbright-Hays for nearly $35,000. She will conduct a year’s fieldwork in Tanzania, studying risk and ethnicity in relation to protected lands, i.e. national parks and conservation.
  • Recent awards for outstanding research proposals: Jamie Forde, Jessica Lee, Lindsay Jones and Sheila Goff received Walker Van Riper awards; James Loudon, Jonathan O’Brien, and Larry Ulibarri won William H. Burt Awards; Lori Fields, sole winner of the Clark Native American Student Scholarship for museum-related studies; Aimee Garza will receive a Graduate Student Summer Research Award.
  • Michelle Sauther has also won an award from The Burt Museum Fund for her recent research proposal.
  • American Antiquity has accepted a manuscript by Mark Mitchell, PhD candidate, for publication. Please keep an eye out for “Research Traditions, Public Policy, and the Underdevelopment of Theory in Plains Archaeology: Tracing the Legacy of the Missouri Basin Project” in an upcoming edition.
  • Bert Covert recently hosted a series of workshops that were featured at the American Association of Physical Anthropologists meeting in Milwaukee and also gained the attention of USA Today. An article about Covert’s work appeared in the April 26 edition of the newspaper. The workshops focused on primate conservation in Vietnam.
  • Our faculty will be joined by a rising star in the fall. Kaifa Roland brings with her superb teaching skills and exceptional scholarship in Cuba’s use of tourism to sustain its socialist economy. She will be featured in this summer’s edition of News from Hale, our annual alumni newsletter.
  • Dennis McGilvray won an NSF grant to conduct fieldwork on post-tsunami reconstruction and relief efforts in Sri Lanka. He will be joined by Pat Lawrence, who will be doing consultant work for the Asia Foundation on early warning systems to contain grassroots violence.
  • The Environmental Studies faculty has unanimously voted Russ McGoodwin to serve as a member of the ENVS Core Faculty. ENVS Core Faculty serve on a voluntary basis on committees, advise graduate students, and are voting members of the department on fixed term appointments. The ENVS Director wanted to have someone who would provide a link to Anthropology, since ENVS is a broadly interdisciplinary program at both the undergraduate and graduate level. During the forthcoming academic year ENVS will also be developing a strategic plan and Provost’s hiring initiative.
  • Payson Sheets has been elected Fellow to the American Association for the Advancement of Science for his ‘distinguished contributions to Mayan archaeology, especially the study of prehistoric volcanism, and for innovative applications of remote sensing and geophysical instrumentation.’ The AAAS, in existence since 1874, will honor Dr. Sheets during a special forum of the AAAS’s Annual Meeting in St. Louis on Saturday, February 18, 2006.
  • Doug Bamforth has been offered a contract from Cambridge University Press to include his book The Archaeology of the North American Great Plains in their Cambridge World Archaeology series.
  • Jonathan O’Brien won a Provost’s Fellowship in Technology through CU’s Graduate Teacher Program. His goal is to produce an interactive CD-ROM for the fall Physical Anthropology labs.

  • Graduate student Joanna Mishtal has been awarded the prestigious Thomas Edwin Devaney Dissertation Fellowship and has been named a Center for Humanities and the Arts Graduate Fellow for the 2004-2005 academic year.
  • Terry McCabe won a $300,000 grant as co-principal investigator for the project “Causes and Consequences of Parks for Livelihood Diversification and Biodiversity in East Africa”.
  • Payson Sheets and his wife will be enjoying a partial-expense-paid visit to Beijing as guests of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, for whom he is heading a committee at their international conference on remote sensing in archaeology this fall.
  • Linda Cordell received the Byron Cummings award in August, for “outstanding contributions in archaeology, anthropology or ethnology” in the Southwest. The award is given annually by the Arizona Archaeological and Historical Society, which publishes the Southwest’s major peer reviewed journal. The award noted: “Linda S. Cordell is recognized for her role as a major contributor to research on ancestral Puebloans, for her influential writings, and for teaching and guiding new generations of Southwestern archaeologists.”
  • Bert Covert won a $15,000 grant to fund his research on endangered primates in Vietnam.
  • Bert Covert has been invited to Washington to conduct a seminar at the Smithsonian entitled “Unexpected Locomotor Diversity Among Vietnamese Leaf Monkeys”. He will also present a guest lecture at George Washington University on primate conservation in Vietnam.
  • Graduate student Xiaomei Chen has won third place in the Office of International Education’s photo competition. Her image of a Tibetan pilgrim garnered a $75 gift certificate and is on exhibition in Norlin.
  • Art Joyce has been awarded a CRCW Faculty Fellowship for 2005-06 for his project, “Reinterpreting the Ancient Civilizations of Southern Mexico”.
  • Terry McCabe will have his book, Cattle Bring Us to Our Enemies: Turkana Ecology, History, and Raiding in a Disequilibrium System, published by the University of Michigan Press. This work is “an in-depth look at the ecology, history, and politics of land use among the Turkana pastoral people in Northern Kenya…based on 16 years of fieldwork…McCabe examines how individuals use the land and make decisions about mobility, livestock, and the use of natural resources in an environment characterized by aridity, unpredictability, insecurity and violence…” McCabe is one of the original members of the South Turkana Ecosystem Project. His new book forms part of the series Human-Environment Interactions by the University of Michigan Press.