The big news in the Department of Anthropology has been the election of Professor Lewis Binford to the National Academy of Sciences. This raises the number of members in our Department to two (the other is Professor Fred Wendorf). Professor Binford’s magnum opus, Constructing Frames of Reference: An Analytical Method for Archaeological Theory Building Using Hunter-Gatherer and Environmental Data Sets, was also published this spring by Princeton University Press. The book generated great interest at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.
We had several visitors to campus this year. George Bass (Texas A & M) came to talk about the world’s oldest shipwrecks and the field of nautical archaeology. A month later Robert Ballard, known for his explorations of the Titanic, and more recently the Black Sea, was on campus for a Tate Lecture. Professor Mike Adler joined other colleagues at SMU (in history and law) and Ballard for a panel discussion of "Who Owns the Past" moderated by Professor Caroline Brettell. Kennewick Man, the Elgin Marbles, and other archaeological materials that have raised issues about intellectual property, cultural property, and the sometimes conflicting values of science and religion were the focus of the debate.
Professor David Gilmore (SUNY-Stonybrook) was this year’s George and Mary Foster Distinguished Lecturer in Cultural Anthropology. For thirty years Gilmore has worked on the ethnography of Spain, focusing in particular on social stratification, gender, and folklore. He lectured on democratization and culture change in post-Franco Spain. Gilmore was invited as part of the year-long celebration of "things Spanish" on campus in conjunction with the opening of the new Meadows Museum. The Pig Roast speaker was Stephen Lekson (Colorado), a well-known scholar of Chaco. In a lecture titled "Writing Prehistory" Lekson focused on the connections between Chaco and sites in northern Mexico, stressing that archaeologists should examine the Southwest as a large region of interaction rather than an area full of isolated settlements and non-interacting peoples.
We brought H. Gill-King, one of our earliest Ph.D.’s, to campus to offer a course on Forensic Anthropology during the spring semester. The course was full immediately and word has it that the stories he told about real cases that he has worked on were captivating.
Finally, Lana Coggeshall, our administrative assistant for two and a half years, is moving to Milwaukee to join her fiancé who has taken a position at the natural history museum in that city. We will miss her. Lana’s successor is Pamela Hogan whom we are delighted to welcome to the Department. You can find her at the same extension: 768-4152.
Caroline Brettell
Victoria Lockwood returned to Dallas from her year at the NSF in Washington. She is spending much of her time finishing her book tentatively titled Renegotiating Patriarchy: Gender and Development in the Tahitian Islands. Fred Wendorf completed the manuscript Holocene Settlement in Egyptian Sahara: The Archaeology of Nabta Playa which will be published by Plenum Press. Several students and a post-doc were working fast and furiously on it last fall to meet a deadline. Fred also has a number of other publications in press and is currently involved in an archaeological field school for Egyptian Antiquities Inspectors. He also plans a book on the prehistory of North Africa. Caroline Brettell received a grant from the National Science Foundation. Brettell will work with two colleagues at SMU (Dennis Cordell in History and James Hollifield in Political Science) and a colleague at the University of Texas at Arlington (Manuel Garcia y Griego) on a study of recent immigrants to the DFW Metroplex. The project is titled "Immigrants, Rights, and Incorporation in a Suburban Metropolis". Carolyn Sargent’s NSF grant for a project titled "Representations of Family among Malian Migrants in Paris, France" is pending. Brettell and Sargent also published the third edition of Gender in Cross-Cultural Perspective (Prentice-Hall) and Brettell, with James Hollifield, published Migration Theory: Talking Across Disciplines (Routledge). Lewis Binford also received a National Science Foundation grant for his project "Developing Frames of Reference for Archaeological Research with Data on Hunter-Gatherer Technology, Social Organization, and Environment." Garth Sampson spent the spring semester teaching at the University of Washington. He remains active in his research in the Seacow River valley in South Africa. The research focuses on changes in habitat and socio-political boundaries that constrain the movements of prehistoric and historical hunter-foragers in an open, semi-desert environment. Mike Adler offered a teacher-training workshop ("Archaeology: Our Window into the Past") at the SMU-in-Legacy campus during the summer. Adler continues his work at the Chaves-Hummingbird ruin near Albuquerque. This summer he will welcome Earthwatch Volunteers at the site. During spring break anthropology and journalism student Tim Jaster, who is has been working on an internship with Adler, accompanied him to New Mexico.
David Freidel received the Gambrinus Guiseppe Mazzotti Literary Prize for A Forest of Kings. His class "Fantastic Archaeology" was also featured in the December 1, 2000 issue of the Chronicle for Higher Education. Freidel is also developing new research at El Peru in Peten, Guatemala. He has received support from the Jerome E. Glick Foundation of St. Louis for this research.
Mike Adler and David Freidel contributed essays to the CD produced in conjunction with the Sacred Spaces exhibition sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Earth and Man. This exhibition opened in the Hall of State at Fair Park in September of 2000. Adler and Freidel also presented papers at the symposium held in conjunction with the exhibition.
David Meltzer continues his research at Paleoindian sites. Each summer he takes from 4 to 6 graduate and undergraduate students into the field. Recently he has been working on several papers about Folsom. He also continues to write about the history of archaeology. He presented a paper "In the heat of controversy: C.C. Abbott, the American Paleolithic, and the University Museum, 1889-1893" at the 2000 meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The paper has now been submitted to a volume titled Archaeology and Archaeologists in Philadelphia edited by D. Fowler and D. Wilcox.
Van Kemper received funding to continue his long-term research in Tzintzuntzan, Mexico. He juggles his time between theology and anthropology and this academic year taught an urban ministry course in the Perkins School of Theology.
Ron Wetherington continues as the director of the Center for Teaching Effectiveness. This year he oversaw the selection of four faculty members from across the campus to be the first four distinguished teaching fellows in association with a new program funded by the current Chair of the SMU Board of Trustees, Ruth Altshuler. Ron will be teaching the field school at Fort Burgwin in the summer of 2001 and plans to draw on both prehistoric and historical evidence.
Tony Marks published several papers focusing on his research in Portugal and the Crimea. He works in the field each fall, excavating a late Middle Pleistocene cave in Portuguese Estremadura. The research has been funded by the NSF, the Leakey Foundation, the Provost’s Office of SMU and a Donor Fund. Students John Williams and Jeffrey Rose accompany him to the field. David Wilson is deep into several new book projects, and is also working on the second edition of Indigenous South Americans of the Past and Present (Westview)
OTHER ACTIVITIES
The Department of Anthropology has been building alliances with other institutions in the metroplex. Our connections to the zoo are solidified. Several students are working on internships there and every fall Ken Kaemmerer, the Curator of Mammals, offers his course "Monkeys and Apes: The Non-Human Primates." We have also launched discussions with the Dallas Museum of Natural History about collections management, shared programs, and shared positions. Faculty continue to give lectures all over the metroplex, bringing anthropology to the masses. This spring we also held another of our "professionalization workshops" for our graduate students – tackling such issues as: how to present a paper at meetings, how to move a paper to publication, how to construct a CV, how to put together a job packet. The workshop was led by Professors Meltzer and Brettell and we invited graduate students from across the campus.
The Departmental Website (http://www.smu.edu/anthro) is growing. We have included information on our graduates. We are also posting information on new programs. Thanks again are due to Sue Linder-Linsley, Director of Collections Management, for all her hard work maintaining the web site.
The winner of the 2001 Edward I. and Peggy C. Fry Award is Allison Mittler. Allison is also a member of the Hyer Society and will graduate this spring with departmental distinction. Several students took advantage of the new credit internship possibilities in the department. John Paul Michel worked with Ken Kaemmerer, Curator of Mammals at the Dallas Zoo. John Paul, who was funded by the Maguire and Irby Family Public Service Intern Program, completed a behavioral inventory of the zoo’s ring-tailed lemurs. Tim Jaster, our resident journalism and anthropology major, has been working with Professor Adler on material from the Chaves-Hummingbird site. Shelly Hartsfield has been working on contract archaeology with Wendy Lopez Associates. Dorothy Peprah is interning with Refugee Services of North Texas. Wendy Cooper’s internship has been with the International Center for Linguistics.
The following students completed dissertations in AY00-01: Beverly Smith "Church and State: AIDS in Rural Kenya" (Sargent); James Kendrick "Archaeological Studies in the Lowrey Area: An Examination of Greathouse Development in Southwestern Colorado" (Adler); and David Johnstone "The Ceramics of Yaxana, Yucatan." (Freidel). A number of students presented papers or participated on panels at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Jason Labelle, Joseph Miller, Kit Nelson, John Seebach, and Russell Gould were involved in a symposium co-organized by Lewis Binford and Amber Johnson (Ph.D, SMU 1997) titled Exploring Niche Variability As a Possible Key to Evolutionary Processes Operative Within and Among Cultural systems. Michelle Rich was involved in two panels including one focused on Corporate Groups in Great Prehispanic Mesoamerica. Risa Diemond Arbolino and Hilary Chester participated in a general session on Southwest Agriculture: Labor and Technology. Brian Andrews participated in a poster session on Geoarchaeology and Formation Processes and Tara Bond-Freeman and Dave Johnstone were in a general session devoted to Lower Maya Settlements and Landscapes.
Several Students also presented papers or posters at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in San Francisco last November: William Allen ("The construction of Korean Immigrant Identities; The 1st, 2nd and 1.5 generations"; Melissa Nibungco ("Sweat, Cough and Vices: Tuberculosis in the Philippines"); Cheryl Crichley ("Women, Households and Health in Nicaragua"). Robert Graff was one of 50 graduate students selected to receive a travel stipend to attend the National Institutes of Health conference in Bethesda, MD "Toward Higher Levels of Analysis: Progress and Promise in Research on Social and Cultural Dimensions of Health." Robert completed his qualifying exams this spring and plans to begin his field research on HIV/AIDS among Hispanic populations in the metroplex. Michelle Amoruso and Melissa Nibungco attended the NSF summer methods workshop. Each year we have sent students to this program. Ian Mast was invited, as a former recipient of a Social Science Research Council fellowship, to participate in a fellows workshop in San Diego where he presented a paper.
The following students received NSF pre-dissertation summer ethnographic training grants: Lia Oberstar, to develop a project on ethnic food consumption among immigrant adolescents in the DFW metroplex; Lynn Wildenstein, to study the political and economic context of chronic pain in the United States; and Michelle Amoruso to develop a project on dengue fever in Trinidad. Sharon Young is the 2001 recipient of the Dr. Mary Moore Free Ethnology Research Fellowship. She will spend the summer in the border area developing her dissertation research on "Environment Inequity at the US-Mexican Border: Analysis of Acute Respiratory Illnesses as Evidence of Risk Differential."
Several students in the department received grants from the Institute for the Study of Earth and Man to support their research. Among them were: Chen Shengqian ("Adaptation Changes of Hunter-Gatherers in China during the Pleistocene and Holocene Transition"), Risa Diemond ("Prehistoric Agricultural Strategies in the Taos New Mexico Area"), Jason Labelle ("PaleoIndian Mobility and Landscape Use on the High Plains"), and Linda Lindsay ("Microprobe Analysis of Bone Content in Prehistoric Ceramics").
Kit Nelson received the fall Steed Travel award for her paper "The Ceramic Chronology of Nabta Playa" presented at the Poznan Conference of North African Archaeology. Tim Benner and Jason Labelle received the spring awards. Tim presented a paper titled "Examining Poverty Measurement and Variation within a Rural Philippine Community" at the annual meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology in Merida, Mexico. Jason presented a paper titled "Paleoindian Economic Specialization in the Great Plains" at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.
Richard Maddy published "Fictive Kinship in American Biomedicine" in New Directions in Anthropological Kinship (Linda Stone, editor). Sudeshna Ghosh-Pandey received an NSF Dissertation Improvement grant for her project "Female Wage Labor and Renegotiation of patriarchal Ideologies in Semi-rural West Bengal, India." Robert Bimbi completed his qualifying exams and left for Hungary where he will be studying the reception of new immigrants. He received a three-month fellowship at the Europa Institut in Budapest.
Tara Skipper presented a paper "Deindustrialization, Job Loss, and Women’s Household Decision Making in a Southern Town" at the Anthropology meetings. Tara also gave birth to Dinah Grace McCahan this April.
Clarissa Schultz Huang (BA 1994) gave birth to a daughter, Kristin Michelle on September 26, 2000. Tung Yuan-chao (PhD 1993) received a fellowship to be at the Harvard-Yenching Institute for the academic year 2001-2002. Shannon Smith (MA-Medical 1996) is currently working with Dr. Sara Quandt at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine (Winston-Salem, NC) as project manager for two NIH grants exploring health issues in the rural elderly. Doug Henry (PhD 2000) presented a paper "The War Has Eaten Us: Somatic Expressions of Trauma and Vulnerability During Conflict" at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association. He is currently Senior Research Associate at UT-Southwestern in the Community Prevention and Intervention unit of the Department of Internal Medicine. Currently he is working on a CDC funded project that looks at social and environmental influences on the at-risk behavior of young gay and bisexual men in Dallas. Lisa Henry (PhD 2000) has been teaching at SMU, offering an honors section of "Introductory Cultural Anthropology" as well as "Peoples of the Pacific." She presented a paper "Health Transition in the Pacific: The Reconstruction of Disease Etiology and Practice" at the AAA meetings.
Michael Adler, "Lessons from Chaco Canyon," Science 290:941-943.
Caroline Brettell, "Not that Lineage Stuff: Teaching Kinship into the 21st Century," IN Linda Stone, ed., New Directions in Anthropological Kinship. Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 48-70.
David Freidel, "The Lowland Maya Civilization, Historical Consciousness and Environment," (with Justine Shaw) IN The Way the Wind Blows: Climate, History and Human Action,(R.S. Macintosh et al, eds., Columbia University Press, pp. 271-300.
Victoria Lockwood, "Income, Productivity and Evolving Gender Relations in Two Tahitian Islands," IN Women Farmers and Commercial Ventures: Increasing Food Security in Developing Countries. Lynne Rienner, pp. 113-129.
Anthony Marks, "The Lower to Middle Paleolithic Shift in Europe: Continuity, Replacement or Diffusion," American Journal of Physical Anthropology. Annual Meeting Issue, Supplement 30:220.
David Meltzer, "What do you do when no one’s been there before? Thoughts on the exploration and colonization of new lands." IN The First Americans: The Pleistocene Colonization of the New World, N. Jablonski, ed., California Academy of Sciences.
Garth Sampson, "On the size and shape of Later Stone Age fibre-tempered vessels in the uper Seacow River valley," South African Field Archaeology 8(1):3-16.
Fred Wendorf, "A Survey of the Paleolithic" IN The Archaeology of Ancient Egypt: an Encyclopedia, K Bard, ed. (Garland).
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.