Archaeologists Visit Ancient Native American Earthworks

Class stops to observe “The Octagon” preserved at a golf course in Newark, Ohio The Fall 2012 Great Lakes Archaeology class (ANT 2500), taught by Prof. Tamara Bray, visited the Octagon Earthworks (a 2000 year old lunar observatory) in Newark, Ohio, during last weekend of October. The visit was part of a two-day camping and field studies expedition that focused on the many world-renowned Adena, Hopewell and Mississippian period culture sites within easy striking distance of Detroit. The class earlier completed another overnight excursion to archaeological and historic sites in western Ontario.  

Students  look  at  Environment  and  Culture  

Mead left; Bennis right; MDCH staffer center Paula Mead and Ashley Bennis (Anthropology undergraduate students) presented “Anthropological Perspectives on Environmental Health and Environmental Justice” for the Michigan Department of Community Health (MDCH) August, 2012. Their Community Engagement class practicum project relates closely to ongoing fieldwork by WSU medical anthropologists (Sherylyn Briller, Andrea Sankar, Mark Luborsky and Todd Meyers) for the MDCH Division of Environmental Health Toxicology and Response Section on bio-monitoring of urban fishing and consumption on the Detroit River and several other local waterways. Kudos to Mead and Bennis on a great job presenting their work to state officials and engaging in a research activity generally only arrived at much later in one’s career! After graduation, Paula (who is a currently a McNair Scholar) will apply to graduate schools with a specialty in medical anthropology; Ashley is applying to law school with a special interest in environmental issues, health and the law.  

Math Corp Researchers Complete Fieldwork

Chrisomalis and Graduate Research Assistant Monica Rodriguez In 2012, Dr. Stephen Chrisomalis concluded his multi-year ethnographic investigation of the Math Corps program at WSU. The project, entitled 'Acquiring a mathematical culture at Math Corps,' investigates how middle school and high-school students in Math Corps learn a set of skills and simultaneously a set of values relating to this community of practice. Math Corps has been a fixture at Wayne for 20 years. Its students are drawn from Detroit public and charter schools with a wide range of mathematical ability and enthusiasm initially, but rapidly acquire and share in a set of locally developed forms of talking about and thinking about their experiences in the program. Since 2008, Dr. Chrisomalis' research has helped pinpoint the ways in which participants acquire positive values associated with particular ways of doing mathematics and talking about mathematical reasoning, and also how their moral and social worlds are transformed through these experiences. Because over 80% of Math Corps graduates go on to college, this research helps to contextualize the social system in which these outcomes are achieved. For more information about the Math Corps, see http://www.mathcorps.org.    

Medical  Anthropology  Alum  Receives   Prestigious  Fellowship  at  U  of  M    

Dr. Nevedal (hat) with her mentor, Prof. Andrea Sankar Recent medical anthropology Ph.D. Andrea Nevedal received a two-year postdoctoral research fellowship with the Advanced Rehabilitation Research Training Program funded by the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research at the University of Michigan Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. She will be using her training in Anthropology, Gerontology and Public Health to assist Denise Tate with a qualitative study on bladder and bowel complications among civilians and veterans with spinal cord injuries funded by the Department of Defense. The postdoctoral program will also involve working on publications and training in the field of disability and rehabilitation research.      

Dingell/Harrison  Archaeology  Summit  at  the  Huron  River    

 Recent  Anthropology  MA  Dan  Harrison  (left)  chats  with  Congressman    Dingell  and  staffer  in  August    On  August  5,  2012,  Congressman  John  Dingell  spoke  at  the  dedication  of  a  state  historic  marker  at  the  site  of  General  William  Hull's  crossing  of  the  Huron  River  in  July,  1812.    As  the  only  surviving  portion  of  the  nation's  first  military  road,  the  site  is  now  on  the  National  Register  of  Historic  Places.    The  wooden  segment  (a  corduroy  road)  of  "Hull's  Trace"  was  the  centerpiece  of  a  Master's  project  by  Dan  Harrison,  WSU  Anthropology  graduate  student.  Following  the  ceremony,  Dingell  and  field  aide  Mark  Cochran  conferred  with  Harrison  on  plans  to  include  the  site  in  the  River  Raisin  National  Battlefield  Park.    Later,  at  a  meeting  of  the  Historical  Society  of  Michigan,  Harrison  accepted  the  2012  Restoration  and  Preservation  Award  for  his  work  on  the  project  (http://www.hsmichigan.org/2012/09/28/society-­‐presents-­‐2012-­‐state-­‐history-­‐awards-­‐in-­‐monroe/)  

Historical Archaeologists Find Evidence of Monserrat’s Earliest Inhabitants  

Archaeologists collect surface finds; Ryzewski teaches historic preservation to Monserrat school children The summer of 2012 marked the third field season of the Survey and Landscape Archaeology on Montserrat project (SLAM), co-directed by Krysta Ryzewski of Wayne State and John Cherry of Brown University. Over six weeks, the SLAM research team, comprised of the co-directors, three PhD students from Brown and Boston University, two undergraduate students from Wayne State and the University of Leicester (UK), and local participants, conducted archaeological survey and excavations on the Caribbean island. The team focused on mapping and determining the extent of three remote sites, all of which show evidence of long term occupation by multiple Amerindian, European, and Afro-Caribbean inhabitants over the past 1,000 years. The archaeological team had the opportunity to enter the island’s volcanic exclusion zone for the first time, and to conduct emergency surveys of four historic-period sites that have remarkably survived the catastrophic eruptions of the Soufriere Hills volcano, which has destroyed over half of the island since 1995. The most significant discovery of the summer was a large, concentrated lithic (flint) assemblage found at the Upper Blake’s site in the island’s north, at about 300 meters above sea level. Discovered during a systematic pedestrian survey, the assemblage included an extensive toolkit: percussion blade-cores, blades, backed blades and blade-flakes of various sizes, and associated débitage, including flakes, micro-flakes and shatter. The assemblage’s location and concentration suggested the preservation of one or multiple knapping events in the vicinity. The Upper Blake’s finds potentially push back the clock on the earliest known settlement dates of Montserrat by as many as 1,500 years. Prior to 2012, the earliest known site

on Montserrat was Trants, an Early Ceramic (Saladoid) settlement, which radiocarbon dates indicate was inhabited as early as 500 BC (2500BP). The lithics from Upper Blake’s bear no similarity to Early Ceramic-period lithic technology, but instead are comparable with lithic technologies of the earlier Archaic period, located at sites elsewhere in the Caribbean. Based on the techno-typological characteristics of the Upper Blake’s lithics, it is now clear that an Archaic-period population existed on Montserrat before the Saladoid peoples, and as early as 2000 BC (4000 BP). This evidence sheds new light on the colonization processes of the Caribbean and on the archaeological history of Montserrat. For a report on the Upper Blake’s site finds published in Antiquity, see: http://antiquity.ac.uk/projgall/cherry333/ For more images from the SLAM project see: http://proteus.brown.edu/montserratarchaeology/Home and http://www.facebook.com/pages/Archaeology-on-Montserrat/137534903036840     Anthropology Learning Community Expands Operations 2012-2013 For the 2012-2013 year the Anthropology Learning Community (ALC) has joined with the new Anthropology Graduate Student Organization (AGSO) for events. Last year, there was great interest among the graduate and undergraduate students to have more opportunities for all anthropology students to interact. Led by AGSO President and ALC Mentor, Elspeth Grieger the focus this year has been creating opportunities to interact with everyone interested in anthropology at Wayne. One initiative was to co-host a monthly movie night open to the entire university. The film Unmistaken Child was screened in October followed by Moolaadé in November. More screenings and other events are in the works for 2013. The ALC also launched an Anthropology Volunteer Certification on October 26th. The event kicked off with an orientation for new or interested anthropology majors. The second hour of the event introduced and signed up student volunteers in nine on-going projects in archaeology, museum studies, cultural, physical, and medical anthropology with instructions on how to complete an official volunteer certification. Finally, the event closed with a department faculty-student pizza party. The placements begin Winter semester 2013. Several graduate students who attended the AAA in San Francisco this year agreed to talk about the AAA experience in an ALC event entitled “What’s

New at the AAA” on November 26th. The event was oriented towards providing students who were unable to go to the AAA with an opportunity to learn about what they missed and information about current events in the field of anthropology. The Anthropology Graduate Student Organization and the Anthropology Learning Community are excited to continue creating further events in semesters to come. Although this fall has primarily focused on professional development events, you can look forward to more networking and fun events this coming winter      Cultural Anthropology Research in Ecuador  

 Professor  Barry  Lyons  continues  ethnographic  research  in  the  Ecuadorian  Andes    

Barry  Lyons  has  been  researching  and  writing  about  how  Ecuadorians  understand  race  and  identity  for  some  time  now.    Here  he  shares  some  insights  from  a  recent  field  work  trip,  “…in  Carnival  parades,  dance  troupes  don  costumes  representing  ethnic-­‐racial  identities.    The  image  shows  a  group  dancing  in  Guaranda,  a  provincial  capital,  on  a  day  during  the  2010  Carnival  festivities  devoted  to  dance  troupes  from  neighboring  indigenous  communities.    Indian  dance  troupes  commonly  display  images  of  what  they  regard  as  their  own  traditional  culture.    The  

dancers'  dress  here  and  their  bare  feet  are  not  as  common  now  in  everyday  life  as  they  were  a  couple  of  generations  ago.    The  two  masked  dancers  at  the  front  represent  a  bird  of  the  high  Andes  (curiquingue)  and  a  diablo  or  "devil"…”        Todd  Meyers  Edits  Book  on  South  African  Youth  

 

In  November,  "War  in  Worcester:  Youth  and  the  Apartheid  State"  (Fordham  University  Press)  was  published  in  the  Forms  of  Living  book  series  edited  by  Dr.  Todd  Meyers,  Assistant  Professor  of  Medical  Anthropology.  The  book,  authored  by  the  preeminent  anthropologist  of  childhood,  Pamela  Reynolds,  is  an  ethnographic  account  of  young  men  in  South  Africa  who,  starting  from  a  very  young  age,  were  involved  in  

the  struggle  against  apartheid  in  a  small  town  in  the  Western  Cape.  The  book  offers  a  keen  analysis  of  the  role  of  youth  in  armed  conflict,  from  the  perspective  of  the  young  fighters  themselves,  as  well  as  delivers  a  sharp  critique  of  the  Truth  and  Reconciliation  Commission's  insistence  on  victim-­‐hood  to  characterize  the  type  of  political  engagement  in  which  these  young  men  were  involved.          

And  finally:    Professor  Allen  Batteau  reminisces  about  his  recent  research  sabbatical.  .  .      

In a Paris Café. . .

Professional high points of the experience included my keynote speech at the First International Conference of Business Anthropology in Guangzhou (China), a meeting with French officials to create a new research institute in the United States, and a meeting with a University of Chicago acquaintance, currently at University College London, who invited me to give a talk there in October. Articles and chapters completed in Paris include “The Poetic Construction of Technology,” “Technology in Business” (for a textbook on Business Anthropology), “The Changing Rhetoric of Corporate Culture” and

I spent my sabbatical writing, talking with colleagues, sampling French wines, listening to lectures, participating in colloquia, exploring cheeses, practicing verb conjugations, and learning the finer points of foie gras on a sabbatical leave in Paris. Invited by colleagues at CETCOPRA (Centre d’Etude des TeChniques des COnnaissances et des PRAtiques) Université Paris 1 – Panthéon Sorbonne), whose work on technology and culture is interwoven with my own, Susan and I arrived in early January and very quickly fell into an intense social and scholarly existence, with no committee meetings, no reports, no election solicitations, and virtually no worries other than what boulevard to stroll down or which boulangerie to visit for baguettes. After only two weeks in Paris, I was invited to be a discussant in a colloquium at Université Paris V, on “Les techniques et la globalisation: échanges, réseaux et espionage industriel au XXe siècle”, to be published next year; and also to present my paper, “‘Sweet Problems’ Network Dynamics, and the Free Flow of Information in a Technological World”, also a future UP V publication.

“The World of Finance” (both for Blackwell’s Companion to Organizational Anthropology), “Horizons of Business Anthropology in a World of Flexible Rationalization” (co-authored by WSU Anthropology alum, Carolyn Psenka, and published in the Journal of Business Anthropology), and substantial work on a chapter, “Business Anthropology Ethics” (co-authors and WSU Anthropology alums Bradley Trainor and Irene Mokra), for Rita Denny’s and Patti Sunderland’s Sourcebook in Business Anthropology.

Social high points of the sabbatical included reconnecting with friends from 40 years ago, and discovering many new friends. After Paris we spent the month of June touring around Normandy and then in the south, visiting vineyards, fromagerie, the Riviera, the Lascaux caves, and the French countryside generally. We are already planning our next trip back.

But this is just a sample!

MORE EXCITING NEWS IN THE JANUARY, 2013 ISSUE OF

THE ANTHROPOLOGY NEWSLETTER

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