This year brought us a wealth of speakers. In the fall Professor Mark Leone, archaeologist at the University of Maryland, presented a Scott-Hawkins lecture on "The Archaeology of Hoodoo: The Remains of Africa in North America." The lecture addressed what has been learned from the archaeological remains of West African religious practices found throughout Annapolis, Maryland. The kitchens, laundries and work rooms of the great houses of Annapolis contain diviners bundles, placed by slaves and free African Americans to control the spirit world and offer protection from the world of their masters. Ruth Behar (University of Michigan) was the Graduate Humanities Lecturer for 2000. She spoke about the ethnographic novel she is writing. It emerges out of her experiences revisiting Cuba, a country she left in 1961. Her book The Vulnerable Observer provided the basis for two evening seminars for students and faculty that focused on issues of reflexivity and genres of anthropological writing. In April, Timothy Malefyt (Ph.D. Brown University), Director of Cultural Insights at Avrett Free and Ginsberg (Bozell Worldwide Advertising) visited campus and delivered a lecture on "Anthropology and Advertising". Malefyt applies the methods of cultural anthropology to better understand consumer behavior and customer satisfaction. His work reflects a current fascination in corporate America with the methods and insights of cultural anthropology. Peter Brosius (Georgia), this year’s Pig Roast speaker, gave a lecture titled "Sleepless after Seattle: Environmental Anthropology at the Millennium. Finally, the Department inaugurated the first "George and Mary Foster Distinguished Lecture in Cultural Anthropology", a series made possible by an anonymous donation. The speaker this spring was Professor Stanley Brandes (UC-Berkeley) who, in a talk titled "Staying Sober in Mexico City", discussed his research on Alcoholics Anonymous in Mexico City. Professor Brandes is currently working on a book based on this research. The Fosters, who are both in their 80s, made the trip to Dallas for this very special event.
The Department was one of several Departments of Anthropology around the United States that sent a letter to the Kansas Board of Education to express dismay at the decision to make the teaching of macroevolution optional. This effort made the front page of the Metropolitan Section of the Dallas Morning News on January 4, 2000 (check out the web site). Teaching macroevolution became a subject of discussion when Stephen Jay Gould, who was on campus for a Tate Lecture, met with students and faculty in Anthropology.
Caroline Brettell
Take a moment to report on your activities. Include your name,
graduation year and degree.
Send information to: Caroline Brettell, Chair, Department of Anthropology,
Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas 75275-0336.
Or email: cbrettel@mail.smu.edu
Please send us any change of address as well
FACULTY NEWS
Victoria Lockwood is completing her year as Program Officer for Cultural Anthropology at the National Science Foundation. She will return to Dallas in August. William Pulte received a $1.3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education (supplemented by $0.5 million from local school districts) to continue the MA Program in Bilingual Education. In the last 15 years the program has graduated 151 students. Fred Wendorf made his annual trip to Egypt with several students and with support from a grant from the Institute of International Education. He continues to excavate at Nabta Playa in south Egypt. Carolyn Sargent and Caroline Brettell have been working on the third edition of Gender in Cross-Cultural Perspective which should be out in August of 2000. Professor Sargent continues her research on Malian immigrant women in France and will be in Paris again in July of 2000. Professor Brettell published Writing Against the Wind: A Mother’s Life History in 1999. She was also appointed to the SNEM-3 Scientific Review Panel of the National Institutes of Health. Lewis Binford was featured in the December 1999 issue of Discovering Archaeology as "the most influential archaeologist of his generation, demanding that the profession move beyond its roots in the humanities and adopt not just the tools but the methods and philosophy of science." Professor Binford also received an honorary degree from the Université Pierre Mendes in Grenoble, France and will be awarded another honorary degree from the Universiteit Leiden in June of 2000. David Meltzer was featured in a major New York Times story about the peopling of the New World–"New Answers to an Old Question: Who Got Here First?"–an article emerging from a meeting in Santa Fe focused on the Clovis site. Professor Meltzer will be on leave in the fall of 2000 to write-up materials from his investigations at the Folsom archaeological site, research sponsored by the Quest Archaeological Research Fund. Michael Adler published the volume Picuris Pueblo: Eight Centuries of Change at a Northern Rio Grande Pueblo. He continues his research at the Hummingbird site near Albuquerque and is also offering short classes for school teachers on archaeology in June at the SMU-Legacy campus. In the fall he will teach the data analysis component of the Field School component of graduate and undergraduate programs at Legacy in new space that we have been given for Southwestern archaeological research. Van Kemper was ordained as a Presbyterian Minister in September of 1999. He has been on leave in AY99-00 and has made several trips to Mexico to carry out the 2000 census in Tzintzuntzan. All of this material will eventually go into a book that focuses on change over time in a field site that has been studied by two generations of anthropologists, beginning with George Foster. Ron Wetherington completed his book Taos: A History, now in production with the University of New Mexico Press. He also continues his activities as the Director of the SMU Center for Teaching Excellence. Ruth Wilson is co-PI on a project located at UT-Southwestern Medical School that focuses on controlling blood pressure in an Urban Black Community. It is funded by the American Heart Association. She chaired a session at the Society for Applied Anthropology Meetings that featured several of our graduate students talking about the research they have conducted through the NSF Ethnographic Training Grant. David Freidel developed a new ANTH/Cultural Formations course titled "Fantastic Archaeology." It was such a success this spring that we have rescheduled it for the fall and it has close to 100 students in it. He is developing new research in Guatemala, but this summer he will return to Paris to teach in the SMU-in-Paris summer program.
Garth Sampson continues his work on the later Stone Age period in South Africa and is currently serving on the NSF Archaeology Advisory Committee. He recently received an NSF grant (co-PI with B. Bousman and L. Kitchen) for "Gravitational Pull of Waterholes on Stone Age hunger-forager Settlement Patters in a Semi-desert environment. Tony Marks has a number of papers in press that focus on his ongoing research in Portugal and the Crimea. He recently received NSF funding for the project "Late Middle Pleistocene Occupations of Almonde."Several graduate students continue to work with him at these sites and to co-author papers. David Wilson is deep into new book projects, one focusing on "Ancient road-Settlement Systems of the Peruvian North coast; Networks of Societal Integration" and the other on "The Evolution of Complex Society in the Casma Valley, Peru."
WEB SITE NEWS
The Departmental Website is growing. We are beginning to add information on our graduates. We are also posting new programs such as the fledgling internship program for our undergraduate students. Thanks again are due to Sue Linder-Linsley, Director of Collections Management for all her hard work maintaining the web site.
UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT NEWS
The winners of the 2000 Edward I. and Peggy C. Fry Award were Catrina Whitley and Michelle Hartsfield. Catrina Whitley, who is very interested in forensic anthropology, will also graduate with distinction. Both students intend to pursue advanced degrees in anthropology at some point down the road. Everyone should check out the paver brick honoring Edward Fry that the faculty has sponsored in the faculty plaza to the west of Fondren Library Center. Kudos to Allison Mittler who will graduate next year for her expert organization of the Brown Bag Series this year and for being named to the Robert Stewart Hyer Society. Ten anthropology majors and minors were listed on the SMU Honor Role.
GRADUATE STUDENT NEWS
The following students completed dissertations in AY99-00: Lisa Schilling Henry, "The Reconstruction and Revitalization of Tahitian Healing" (Sargent); M. Douglas Henry, "Embodied Violence: War and Relief Along the Sierra Leone Border" (Sargent); Michael Bever, "Paleoindian Lithic Technology and Landscape Use in Late Pleistocene Alaska: A Study of the Mesa Complex" (Meltzer); Sandra Weinstein Bever, "Migration, Household Economy, and Gender: A Comparative Study of Households in a Rural Yucatec Maya Community" (Lockwood); Susan Racine, "How it Go Look: Beauty and Commodity in Urban Trinidad" (Brettell); Francisco Jose Nunes da Silva Almeida, "The Terminal Gravettian of Portuguese Estremadura: Technological Variability of the Lithic Industries" (Marks); and Travis Stanton, "Heterarchy, Hierarchy, and the Emergence of the Northern Lowland Maya: A Study of Complexity at Yaxuna, Yucatan, Mexico (400 B.C.-A.D. 600) (Freidel). Many of these students presented work at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A sampling of other graduate student presentations at the SAA meetings include: Jon Seebach, "Archaeology and the Environment" (poster); Risa Diemond, "A Panorama of the American Southwest" (poster); Jim Kendrick (recipient of a 99-00 Faculty Distinction Award for Dissertation Completion), Amber Munoz and Professor Adler, "Emergent Agricultural Economies of the Southwest" (symposium) (Amber was also part of a symposium titled "The Mathematics of Cultural Evolution; Taking Stock in the Year 2000); Tara Bond-Freeman was part of a general session "Archaeology of Yucatan"; Pei Lin Yu, "Subsistence, Material and Demographic Approaches to Mobility" (symposium); Katherine Monigal, John Williams and Professor Marks,"The Upper Paleolithic of the Levant: The Current State of Research" (symposium); Mary Kathryn Brown (and Travis Stanton),"Religion and Ritual in Mesoamerica and Central America" (syposium); Michael Bever, Jason Labelle, and Marie-Blanche Roudaut, "Technology and Technological Change".
Ian Mast and Lisa Henry won Steed Travel Awards in the fall semester to present papers at the annual meeting of the American Anthropology Association. Ian’s paper was titled "Creating a Global Village: Ethnic Entrepreneurship and the Business of Transnationalism." Lisa, who was awarded her Ph.D. in December delivered a paper titled "The Revitalization of Indigenous Healing: A Tahitian Case." The spring travel award went to Joseph Miller for his paper "Giving a Static Record a Dynamic Past: Strategies for Studying the Archaic of the North American Southwest." Sandra Bever, who was also awarded her Ph.D. in December, has taken a job at Santa Clara University in California. Sandra has been teaching two courses at SMU this spring–"Human Evolution" and "Peoples of Mexico." Michael Bever recently defended his dissertation and was awarded his degree in May. He will look for contract archaeology work in California. Richard Maddy co-authored an article dealing with cultural barriers to compliance in the treatment of diabetes and hypertension that appeared in the March issue of Postgraduate Medicine. As a result he was invited to a symposium in August as part of the International society of Hypertension. Rick has also authored a chapter ("Fictive Kinship in American Biomedicine") of a book New Directions in Kinship Studies (Linda Stone, editor) that will appear in 2000. The chapter began as a research paper in Dr. Brettell’s seminar "Social Organization". Arushi Sinha is working as the director of the new Cross-Cultural Health Track for the Department of Family Medicine at the University of North Texas Health Science Center. Her dissertation research is in process. Pei-Lin Yu has taken a position as "Park Archaeologist" with the Park Service at Great Smoky Mountain National Park in Tennessee and from there she too continues to work on her dissertation.
Tim Benner, Debra Hultsch, Ian Mast, and Mary Nolan have all returned from the field and are working on their dissertations. Tim received the Dean’s Dissertation Completion Fellowship for the spring of 2000. Jim Kendrick is completing his dissertation on settlement and religion in the American Southwest with help from a Faculty Distinction Award.
ALUMNI NEWS
Kathie Powell Benjamin (MA Med, 1981) began her post SMU career in hospital administration and pursued an MA in Health Care Administration from Texas Women’s University. She is currently CEO of a community health center in Lancaster, PA. Her anthropological training comes in handy since 60% of the patients are Hispanic and the Board itself is ethically diverse. Lisa Shaddox (1990) has recently returned to archaeology after several years. She is currently working for CAR/UTSA doing contract archaeology at Camp Bowie in Brownwood. Sara Essig (BA 1996) is publications editor at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. She is recently married. Barbara Lomonaco (Ph.D. 1995) was nominated for a major teaching award at Transylvania University. This summer she will be teaching two courses in Italy: one on Etruscan/Roman archaeology and the other on Urban Life in Italy. She is also getting married ("to the only other Italian in the state of Kentucky!"). Justine Shaw (Ph.D. 1998) has completed a year at the College of the Redwoods and presented a paper titled "Climate Change and Deforestation; Implications for the Southern Collapse" at the SAA meetings in Philadelphia. Mark Holland (B.S. 1991) was recently appointed senior pastor at Trinity United Methodist Church in Kansas City, Kansas "a struggling urban church" located in a neighborhood that is 75% African-American but with a 90% white membership. He and his wife have just bought a house where they will raise their family (they have a 2 year-old named Daniel who is "very smart"). Mark writes that he plans to spend "the next 10-15 years tackling the problems of race, poverty, and denominational decline." Paula Taweel (BA 1999) and Clarissa Schultz Huang (BA 1994) returned to campus this spring to talk about "what she is doing after graduation." Paula is working as a systems analyst at J.C. Penney’s. Last fall her colleagues posted on her door an article about anthropologists in the corporate world. She appears to be riding a trend. Clarissa is a Project Manager for Intelligent Network Integration at MCIWorldCom. She is also expecting a baby. Jeff Jordan (MA-Medical, 1996) has been working for Dallas County Health and Human Services but in the fall he will enter the University of Texas School of Public Health to pursue an MPH. Shirley Achor (Ph.D. 1974) retired from Texas A&M-Commerce in May of 1998. Her most recent publications were two articles (one on "Barrios" and the other on "Hispanic Americans") for the two volume Encyclopedia of Urban America: The Cities and Suburbs (Neil Larry Shumsky, ed., 1998). She also edited the 60th Anniversary Issue of The Record of the Dallas Archaeological Society. Finally, she is also writing poetry (check out her web site at www.flash.net/~sachor).
On a sadder note, the following students passed away during the past academic year: Robert Kimball Smith (MA 1985) and Herman Smith (Ph.D. 1986).
SELECTED FACULTY PUBLICATIONS, 1999-2000
Lewis Binford, "François Bordes 1919-1981. In Encyclopedia of Archaeology: The Great Archaeologists, T. Murray ed.
Caroline Brettell, "Moral Economy or Political Economy? Property and Credit Markets in 19th Century Rural Portugal," Journal of Historical Sociology 12 (1): 1-28.
David Freidel, "A Journey of Discovery: Linda Schele and the Maya Revolution," Discovering Archaeology 1 (2): 32-36.
Anthony Marks (with K. Monigal), "The Middle Paleolithic site of Starosele (Crimea, Ukraine) and its place in the Eastern European Micoquian," Archaeological Anthology 8:77-90.
David Meltzer, "Human responses to Middle Holocene (Altithermal) climates on the North American Great Plains," Quaternary Research 52:404-416.
Garth Sampson, "Amphibian remains from a later Stone Age rock shelter in the Karoo," ArchaeoZoologia.
Fred Wendorf, An Archaeological Investigation of the Central Sinai, Egypt. University Press of Colorado.
STUDENT ENRICHMENT FUND
We would appreciate any contribution you can make to our student enrichment fund. These funds are used to assist our graduate and undergraduate students. Donations (for any amount) should be sent to the attention of the Chair, Department of Anthropology,Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas 75275-0336. Thanks to Christopher Cramer, Paula Taweel, Scott Langley, Nancy Hazam, Hiram Gregory, H. Michael Howell, Elizabeth Pintar, Carey King.