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November 2015

• Craig Lee (PhD ’07, now a research associate at INSTAAR) was interviewed about his ice patch archaeology for an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences magazine entitled “Inner Workings: Climate change frees ancient artifacts”. Ice preserves an amazing array of artifacts, but as the ice vanishes, so do clues to the past. See: . And keep an eye out for the very cool cover of the next issue of American Archaeology

• 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: , 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: Carla Jones is this week’s author for the Savage Minds Writers’ Workshop, with an essay on “A Case for Agitation: On Affect and Writing�Ũ�Ĕ

• 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.

• Publication:“Mobile Home Community Closures Preferred Despite Worsening Housing Crisis”
  Allison Formanack (PhD Candidate) wrote this lead story for Anthropology News:
  

• Publication:Anthropology as Theoretical Storytelling, Carole McGranahan’s latest blog for the Writer’s Workshop Series on Savage Minds:

• 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.

• Art Joyce, Payson Sheets, Sarah Kurnick, and Stacy Barber made presentations at the First Annual Rocky Mountain Pre-Columbian Association Research Colloquium in Denver a couple of weeks ago. Enjoy the details at

• Ben Joffe (PhD Candidate): Tantra and Transparency, or Cultural Contradiction and Today’s Tibetan Buddhist Wizard. Savage Minds. October 6, 2015. . From a series of reflections on Tibetan diaspora, esotericism, and the globalization of Tibetan culture.

• 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: . 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 �鶹ӰԺ 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: . Thirteen millennia in a �鶹ӰԺ backyard. Read the story on the Mahaffy Cache in the latest Coloradan magazine:

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-�鶹ӰԺ 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:

• 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 �鶹ӰԺ
  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):

• 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 �鶹ӰԺ-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 �鶹ӰԺ Daily Camera story at:

• Scott Ortman’s work on urban settlement patterns was picked up by the journal Science Advances and by CU-�鶹ӰԺ Today. One of the most populous metropolises on the planet, Mexico City, stands atop the ruins of the 15th century Aztec capital Tenochtitlán. The two may not appear to have much in common, but according to a new study they obeyed the same mathematical formula…

• 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 �鶹ӰԺ 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.”

• Rachel Egan is featured in the February Grad Student News from the CU Grad School:

• The Department of Anthropology and the Research Center for Unmanned Vehicles (RECUV) of the University of Colorado-�鶹ӰԺ 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 �鶹ӰԺ 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.
• 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, �鶹ӰԺ) 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
• 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.

• Carole McGranahan has an essay in ALLEGRA; a Virtual Lab of Legal Anthropology entitled, ‘ “I love polyandry, yo”: Tibetan refugee citizenship and the politics of culture”. Do Tibetans still practice polyandry? Find out here:

• Gerardo �ҳܳپ�é������� – 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 .

• Steve Lekson was one of three leaders in the profession chosen for an ‘Exclusive Museum Anthropology Blog Interview’ for this .

• 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).

• Jen Shannon authored a recently-released book: (Santa Fe, NM: SAR Press). 2014. Jen also authored a chapter in an edited volume: , edited by Ray Silverman (New York: Routledge). 2014.

• Marnie Thomson’s essay “In Dialogue: Ethnographic Writing and Listening” was released in the weekly Savage Minds Writer’s Workshop series: .

• 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, .��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.