This year brought a little sadness to all members of the Department of Anthropology. Janice Brown, dedicated and beloved administrative assistant in the department, died on December 10th. She had only recently been diagnosed with breast cancer. In late January members of the department and other SMU and community friends gathered to celebrate her life with stories and music. Lana Coggeshall, a graduate of SMU with a BS in Anthropology, joined the staff as Assistant to the Chair of the Department in mid February. Lana had been working since graduation in the Education Department of the Dallas Museum of Natural History. We have said goodbye to one friend, and welcomed another friend back.
We had the opportunity this year to show off the scientific dimensions of our work to the Dedman Executive Board. Sitting attentively in the lab of Professor Lewis Binford, members of the Board listened to a presentation by several of Lew's students on the strategies for dealing with the archaeological record using knowledge from ecology, climatology, and hunter-gatherer populations. Data from Europe, Asia and the American Southwest were included. This presentation was part of Dean Jasper Neel’s efforts to raise the final funds for the new Science Building at SMU. We will not benefit from the new space but we appreciate the chance to raise the profile of what we do as anthropologists.
The Pig Roast speaker this year was Professor Payson Sheets who delivered a provocative, and at times delightfully humorous, lecture about his work in El Salvador. Several faculty and students were intrigued by some of his methods–using dental plaster to aid in the determination of floral remains. He is excavating a site that was covered in volcanic ash – a New World Pompeii. We are already working to bring Professor Mark Leone, archaeologist at the University of Maryland, to campus in the fall for a Scott-Hawkins lecture. The title of his presentation will be: "The Archaeology of Hoodoo: The Remains of Africa in North America." Ruth Behar will also be visiting campus next year as the 1999-2000 Graduate Humanities Lecturer.
Caroline Brettell, Chair
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
David Wilson published Indigenous South Americans of the Past and Present (Westview). It is a provocative and beautifully illustrated volume that should draw a good deal of comment and interchange. Carolyn Sargent’s co-edited volume (with Nancy Scheper-Hughes) Small Wars: The Cultural Politics of Childhood (California) appeared last fall and received a nice write-up in the Dallas Morning News in the spring. Carolyn was also the recipient of the 1998 SMU Outstanding Professor award. Ruth Wilson is Co-Investigator on a project "Controlling Blood Pressure in an Urban Black Community" funded by the American Heart Association. She also launched the new "Data Analysis" course this spring for the NSF Training Grant students. Victoria Lockwood will be absent from the department during the academic year 1999-2000. She has been asked to serve as the Program Officer for Cultural Anthropology at the National Science Foundation while Stuart Plattner takes a sabbatical. She has been busy this year as Director of Graduate Studies and with her next book, Renegotiating Patriarchy. Lewis Binford has completed his magnum opus, Frames of Reference, now in production at Princeton University Press. In May he was the speaker at a ceremony in Wisconsin honoring all winners of college-level science awards throughout the state. The title of his talk was "The Objectivity Dilemma in Science." Lew will also be recognized in the fall of 1999 with a honorary degree from the Université Pierre Mendes in Grenoble. David Meltzer was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Last fall he became the first recipient of SMU’s President’s Associates Outstanding Faculty Award, an award given to recognize scholarship and teaching. He has recently edited a new edition of E.G. Squier and E.H. Davis’s Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley 150th Anniversary Edition (Smithsonian Press). Michael Adler published several essays in Archaeology of Prehistoric Native America: An Encyclopedia (Garland). He continues to run the field school at Fort Burgwin and recently completed the manuscript on Picuris Pueblo (edited with Herbert Dick). It will be published by the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at SMU. Mike recently received a National Geographic Society Research Grant for the project "Village Formation in the Middle Rio Grande Region, New Mexico." Van Kemper completed his tenure as editor of the journal Human Organizationin December and he will receive his Master of Divinity summa cum laude in May of 1999. 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.
Fred Wendorf was funded again for his research in the Egyptian Sahara. The project seeks to determine the nature of the Saharan Neolithic food economy around 8800 years ago. David Freidel has survived a year as Acting Chair (or, as he has been labeled by colleagues, "virtual chair") and will return to Paris this summer to teach his Cultural Formations class in the museums of Paris. A beautifully illustrated article "Life and Death in a Maya War Zone" appeared in Archaeology in June of 1998. He is deep into his book Flint Shield, an analysis of Maya warfare and the Classic collapse. Caroline Brettell, will resume her duties as Chair in August. She has signed a contract with Routledge for a completed manuscript Migration Theory: Talking Across the Disciplines (co-edited with Jim Hollifield in Political Science) and is working against time to finish the second manuscript, Frontier Schism, before her sabbatical ends. Recently she was elected Vice-President (President in 2000-2001) of the Social Science History Association.
Garth Sampson will be on sabbatical in the fall of 1999 to begin work on a new book. His NSF grant and several publications have laid the foundation for this work. Tony Marks (with co-authors) made several contributions to the first volume of The Middle Paleolithic of Western Crimea. He also continues his archaeological work on the Middle Pleistocene in Portuguese Estremadura and will return there this fall with some of our current graduate students.
WEB SITE NEWS
The SOPA (now Register of Professional Archaeologists) website, attached to our department website, received notification of a Links2Go Key Resource Award in the Archaeology topic. Thanks to Sue Linder-Linsley, Director of Collections Management for all her hard work maintaining the web site.
FIELD SCHOOL/FORT BURGWIN
Two tribal members from Picuris Pueblo will be attending a workshop on paleoethnobotany, the study of prehistoric plan remains, this summer at Fort Burgwin. The workshop, sponsored by the Department and taught by Richard Fort (Michigan), will help Richard Perez and Louise Hena (employees of the Picuris Environmental Program) to understand the agricultural strategies of their ancestors. Picuris is currently exploring avenues to promote self-sustaining agriculture among Native-American groups living in northern New Mexico. Funds to support the tuition for Hena and Perez were raised by Department Chair Dr. Caroline Brettell.
UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT NEWS
Twenty-three undergraduates received BS or BA degrees this spring. The winner of the 1998 Edward I. and Peggy C. Fry Award was Scotty B. Moore. Scotty will pursue graduate study in archaeology at the University of Washington and this summer is part of a team carrying out excavations on the Kurik Islands north of Japan. Upon graduation this spring Paula Taweel will assume a position with JC Penney in Plano. Lindan Hill is graduating with distinction and in the fall he will begin graduate work in anthropology at Indiana University. His distinction project was on "El Niño. Kelle McGill and Elizabeth Peña are both planning to pursue teaching careers in the DISD. Kelle co-authored an article on Kosovo which appeared in a recent issue of a publication of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe. Catherine Dawson, who graduated with BA degrees in Psychology and Anthropology will pursue graduate work in psychology.
GRADUATE STUDENT NEWS
Christy Noonkester was elected as the Secretary of the Student Committee of the Society for Applied Anthropology. Christy has been invited back to the Navajo Field School (run by Ozzie Werner at Northwestern) this summer as an assistant This will help to secure her permit for future dissertation work. Bill Allen has been awarded a Maguire Public Service Internship for the summer of 1999. He will be working with the Korean Society. He has also been accepted to the NSF summer program in Ethnographic Methods to be held on the campus of Duke University. Also accepted was Robert Graff. Bill and Christy shared second place in the Graduate Research Day competition. One of the first place prizes went to Joseph Miller and Michael Bletzer for their project "The Pace of Agricultural Intensification in Europe."
The Department distributed three awards in the Ethnographic Training Grant Program supported by the National Science Foundation. Cheryl Crichley will travel to Nicaragua to conduct preliminary research focusing on the role of women as producers and managers of their own and their family’s health. Melissa Nibungco will be in the Philippines to assess the feasibility of a project on the perception and management of tuberculosis in a rapidly changing health system. Ben Passmore will spend two months in the Czech Republic conducting preliminary research on industrial work organization in a post-socialist setting. Last year’s recipients presented "Brown Bag" talks on their summer research: Christy Noonkester ("Negotiating Risk: Tuberculosis Control in a Navajo National Border Town"); Bill Allen ("Generations Apart: Korean Immigrants, the 1st, 2nd, and 1.5 Generations"); Sudeshna Ghosh-Pandey ("Wage Earning and Gender Ideologies Among Migrant Female Domestic Workers in Calcutta, India"); and Kristen Corey ("Maki Tangata: Exploring the Health of the People of Rarotonga, Cook Islands"). Five students were recipients of 1999 ISEM Seed Grant Awards this spring: Bill Allen, Kat Brown, Cheryl Crichley, Melissa Nibungco and Ben Passmore.
Lisa Schilling Henry and Doug Henry are writing their dissertations at a cabin hide-out in Oklahoma. They make periodic visits to the SMU campus. Lisa was the first recipient of the Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship (a year-long award established by Dedman College Dean Jasper Neel) and she plans to defend during the summer, 1999. Susan Racine has returned from fieldwork in Trinidad and has been working on her dissertation and teaching at the University of North Texas. Sandra Weinstein Bever has returned from her fieldwork in the Yucatan and during the calendar year 1999 she will hold the second Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship. She hopes to defend in November of 1999. She received one of the departmental travel awards in the fall to present her paper "Temporary Labor Migration and Changing Gender Roles in Yucatan, Mexico" at the AAA meetings. Pei-Lin Yu also received a travel award in the fall to present "Moving into the Desert: Earliest Economies of South Australian Hunter-Gatherers" at the 31st annual Chacmool Conference in Calgary. The Puma Project (supported with royalties from Pei-Lin’s book Hungry Lightening) has now been incorporated with Cultural Survival.
Risa Diemond has been awarded a ten-week graduate fellowship at the National Museum of Natural History (Smithsonian). She will be examining ethnohistoric records of early Southwestern Pueblo agricultural practices. Michael Bever won a first prize at the Graduate Research Day for his work "Problems and Progress in the Paleoindian Archaeology of Alaska." He also presented a paper "Stone Tool Use and the Mesa Complex: Developing a Framework of Alaskan Paleoindian Prehistory" at the SAA meetings with help from the Spring Travel Award. Other spring recipients of this award were Tara Bond-Freeman ("The Ceramics of Ichmul de Morley, Yucatan, Mexico") and Katherine Monigal ("The Szeletian at Buran Kaya III (Crimea Ukraine) and its Relevance for a Middle-Upper Paleolithic Transition."
Tim Benner, Debra Hultsch, Ian Mast, and Mary Nolan are all still in the field in the Philippines (2), Mexico, and Germany respectively and Tara Skipper recently left her field site in Alabama and will begin her dissertation once she has settled in Maryland with her husband Chris. Robert Graff was awarded the Mary Moore Free award for his research on HIV/AIDS in the Hispanic Community in Dallas.
Frederic Sellet received his Ph.D. during 1998-99. His dissertation is titled "A Dynamic View of PaleoIndian Assemblages at the Hill Gap Site, Wyoming: Reconstructing Lithic Technological Systems.
John McCall (MA 1973) is now Director of Educational and International Programs and Research Associate in the College of Medicine at the University of Tennessee in Memphis.
In recent years he has delivered a variety of papers on a range of medical subjects including telemedicine, international family medicine, and health care assessment and delivery among the Ache’ Indians of Eastern Paraguay. Patrick Pugh (BA/BBA 1995) worked for Andersen Consulting’s Change Management Practice in Dallas right after graduation but recently took a position with Renaissance Worldwide, a strategy consulting firm headquartered in Boston. Deborah Wallsmith (PhD 1994) manages activities at the Antonio J. Waring Jr. Archaeological Laboratory at the State University of West Georgia. She is currently working on a computer project using satellite imagery to locate buried archaeological and geological features in the northern Sinai. Her son has been in the field with her since the age of 4 months. Lizzie Pintar (PhD 1996) is both a new mother and Associate Professor of Anthropology at Austin College. Staso Forenbaher (PhD 1997) is back in Croatia looking for a university position and conducting research. One 35 team-member project, in Istra (Adriatic) deals with hunter-gatherer adaptation to environmental change during the Holocene. A second focuses on post-Pleistocene prehistory of the Dalmation islands. He is also preparing his dissertation for publication in the British Archaeological Reports International Series and writing "popular anthropology" for a weekly newspaper supplement. Laurie Weinstein (Phd 1983) has published Wives and Warriors: Women and the Military in the United States and Canada (coedited with Christie White) and Gender Camouflage: Women and the U.S. Military (coedited with Francine d’Amico). Laurie is on the faculty of Anthropology at Western Connecticut State University and is also co-chair of Women’s Studies. Randall Moir (Phd 1997) has been serving as the archaeological consultant for a new archaeology course offered at the Episcopal School of Dallas. The students are excavating a site and Wolf Run Ranch near Anna in Collin County. Four thousand artifacts have been unearthed so far–broken knives and nails from the Civil War and pottery and stone tools made by American Indians, some of which date back to the 15th century. Justine Shaw (Phd 1998) recently landed a tenure-track position at the College of the Redwoods in California. Mary Moore Free (PhD 1989), medical anthropologist at Baylor in Dallas has been named to the Board of the Lisa Landry Childress Foundation for organ donor awareness. She also serves as spokesperson for "Pass It On", one of the Foundation programs.
Lewis Binford, "Hearth and Home" IN Middle Paleolithic and Middle Stone Age Settlement Patterns (N.J. Conrad and Fred Wendorf, eds.).
Caroline Brettell, "Fieldwork in the Archives: Methods and Sources in Historical Anthropology" IN Handbook of Methods in Cultural Anthropology (Russell Bernard, ed.)
David Freidel, "Sacred Work, Dedication and Termination in Mesoamerica", IN The Sowing and the Dawning (S.B. Mock ed.).
Van Kemper, "Finding a Footing on the Moral High Ground: Connections, Interventions and Ethical Implications," Human Organization 57:251-263.
David Meltzer, "Recent Research: the Folsom Site New Mexico," Current Research in the Pleistocene 15:42-44
Garth Sampson, "Tortoise remains from a later Stone Age rock shelter in the upper Karoo, South Africa, Journal of Archaeological Science 25:985-1000.
Carolyn Sargent, Ruth Wilson (and others), "Prospects for Family Planning in Cote d’Ivoire: Ethnographic Contributions to the Development of Culturally Appropriate Population Policy. IN Anthropology in Public and International Health (Robert Hahn, ed.)
Fred Wendorf, "Megaliths and Neolithic Astronomy, Southern Egypt" Nature 392:488-491.
Ruth Wilson, "The Role of anthropologists as Short-Term Consultants. Human Organization 57:245-252.
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.