KU AnthropologistVolume 27 Fall 2013

Leaving KU

pg. 3 A message from the chairpg. 4 Saying Goodbye to Dave pg. 6 Another Book for Allan, His 12th! pg. 7 Don Stull was in Garden Citypg. 8 Mary Adair’s News from Spooner Hallpg. 10 Linguistic Anthropology News

pg. 12 Rolfe is Out There in the Fieldpg. 13 Presentations by Faculty and Graduate Students at Professional Meetingspg. 14 Human Migration Lecture Series - Fall 2013pg. 15 Alumni News

I arrived in Lawrence August 26, 1975. It was a hot Saturday morning and I went to a bar and asked for a beer and a shot of whiskey. The bartender said, “you ain’t from around these parts are you?” She was right. I was from Ann Arbor. I had no anticipation, no expecta-tion of staying at KU for more than two semesters. It was a one-year, visiting assistant professor appointment, but became a tenured line the next year. Henry Lundsgaarde was the chairman then and, toward the end of that first year, asked me to write the position announcement, so that I “was the only one qualified.” I am not sure if the department even advertised the position and, as far as I know, they interviewed no one. Those were different times. The department was very different then too. The only continuing members are Mi-chael Crawford, Allan Hanson, John Janzen and Don Stull, who came to KU at the same time as me. There were some troublesome people in the department then and it did not take long for me to encounter Professor Dorothy Willner. She was a dyspeptic person, who looked down on every member of the department as bugs, especially a young physical anthropologist like me. I can remember at faculty meetings she would rise to speak, as if she were in the British Parliament and, whatever she said, was never in support of anything the department was doing. Before we had the merit salary procedures in place, where peer–review of faculty achievements is now standard, Dorothy pro-tested the plan and said she “had no peers at Kansas and would have to send her merit report to the University of Chicago.” Some of us wondered what she would send them. She eventually submitted her merit work to the committee and included her lawsuit against the department as “research in legal anthropology.” Dorothy was the fired from KU during my first year as chairman. Before all this, in the 1980s she wrote a letter to the chairman cc’ing it to everyone from the dean to the chancellor saying she “could not work in Fraser on Sundays because the smell of marijuana emanating from my office was so strong.” She did not cc it to me. My office was more than 120 feet from hers and, if I had been smoking like a Rastafarian, it wouldn’t have reached hers. Bob Squier, the chairman, did not tell me about the letter and knew that I was not even smoking cigarettes at the time. A few weeks later, he received another letter from Dorothy cc’d up and down the line charging that I was now “selling drugs out of my office.” That one he told me about.

It is a wonder any of us got anything accomplished in those days with all the threats and legal distractions from Lundsgaarde, Willner and two former students. But, almost everyone taught their classes and published a lot, maybe to keep their sanity. I was working on the evolutionary changes in the European Upper Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic then and frequently escaped to Europe, once on an NSF grant and sabbatical for two years. But, I enjoyed the department and liked most of my colleagues. When I became chair in 1989 we eventually hired four new faculty (John Hoopes, Jack Hofman, Jane Gibson and Sandra Gray) and the department was re-vitalized and re-invigorated. I can remember an associate dean congratulating me on how much I had fired up the department. I maintained that they had been productive all along, --- some in the administration were just paying too much attention to the troublemakers. Sometimes, I think they still do.

After five years as chairman (1989-1994), the college administrators were changing and I was burned out. How anyone can be chair for more than five years is beyond me. I took a one-year sabbatical, left for Italy, Croatia and Hungary, began working on Neandertals and never looked back. There have been a few disappointments along the way, especially closing the Museum of Anthropology and changing its floor space into a classroom ‘The Commons,’ as if KU needed to have another lecture hall, instead of anthropology exhibits. But I have enjoyed my academic and social life in Kansas. I could not have fallen into a better place.

There have been numerous high points. My research has been featured in some Nova and other TV shows in the USA and Europe, most recently with David Pogue on language origins and the fossil record. I was also really pleased to have an op-ed piece published in the International Herald Tribune/New York Times on the changing image of Neander-tals. Recently, Dana Cope, a former student from the early 1980s, named a 42 million year old omomyid (tarsier-like) fossil species, Mytonius frayeri, so I have entered the fossil record, just as I am fossilized in academia. Another stu-

dent from the early years, John Gurche, was recognized as a CLAS Alumni Distinguished Achievement Award winner for 2013. I have been lucky to be invited to a lot of interna-tional conferences (Ankara, Barcelona, Bologna, Bordeaux, Budapest, Coimbra, Fiesole, Jogyakarta, Lisbon, Pisa, Prague, Tel Aviv, Vienna, Zagreb) to

present my research and have given many talks in the USA at national meetings and elsewhere. As a Sigma Xi Distin-guished Lecturer in 2009-2011 I travelled a lot in the USA, presenting talks about my research. Overall, my academic career has been interesting and fulfilling. In a nonacademic work, in the fall I self-published my thumb drive cookbook, Freestyle Frigo Recipes and Stories, recounting recipes and stories from Turkey to Omaha to Lawrence.

Teaching was always a focus for me and, for the most part, I have enjoyed it. For decades I taught the large 104/304 Fundamentals of Physical Anthropology class, but my other, smaller classes in Human Paleontology, Primates, Human Osteology and the Anthropology of Sex were more interesting. The first time I taught the Anthropology of Sex, it was loaded with football players and their girlfriends. On the first essay test, one student drew only a football play. He also submitted a paper on the impact of Playboy in American culture. It clearly was not written by him and, when I interviewed him about the paper, I said I wanted to ask a few questions. My first was: “Who is Hugh Hefner?” I got a blank look, a long pause, then he said, “that’s the guy I cited in the paper.” I gave him an “F” for plagiarism and reported him to the athletic department’s academic coordinator, who said “I am going to kick his ass.” I later discov-ered that this same academic coordinator had been fired from the Topeka Capital Journal because he had plagiarized a story written by a friend of mine at the Lawrence Journal World a year or so before. Like I said, times were different then. The football player went on to field punts in the NFL.

One of my last classes was Human Evolution. For the Fall 2013 semester, tired of grading papers, quizzes and exams, I decided to only require attendance and have the students turn in their class notes at the end of the se-mester for me to grade. The class was from 11-12:20 TR and every student began with an A, but after two missed classes their grade dropped a full letter, no matter what the excuse. I have heard that a few students contend this is the hardest class they have ever taken. Attendance is especially demanding. I do not allow texting, web-surfing or cell phone use in class, so they are out of touch with the outside world for 80 minutes twice a week. Oh, the deprivations of taking Frayer’s Human Evolution from 11-12:20 TR. My guess is that they got more out of this class than if I was giving exams and requiring papers. They certainly wrote a lot during my very well attended lectures.

After 37+ years of teaching I have gone from being just a little older than the students to their grandfather’s age. I find it more and more difficult to connect. A few years ago I was describing the aye-aye’s middle finger, and said it was “an anatomical joystick.” I got this empty-eyed look and realized not a student in the class knew what a joystick was. Early in my academic life, I purchased the newest device, a joystick, for my Apple II (64K) computer. This was pre-mouse days and once the mouse came in, the joystick went out fast, but I imagined everyone still knew what it was. Students also do not understand that computer memory used to be measured in kilobytes. My reference to oldies also goes unappreciated, --- students today have never heard of Sam Cooke, Martha & the Vandellas or the Fugs, just to name a few. I decided it was time to go.

There are many more stories, but that’s enough for now. I wish my best to just about everyone.

2

a message from the chair

ReVisioning the Future of KU Anthropology. These are chal-lenging times for higher education in Kansas, but we are looking to the future with optimism and determination because we believe in the work we do here. We have taken on some exciting, new projects as we envision the future of our undergraduate and graduate programs. Here are a few things we are working on.

Anthropology across the country has changed from its older, four-field character to programs that specialize. We are currently focus-ing areas of faculty expertise along thematic lines that we mean to align with the kinds of work anthropologists do when they leave the university, whether with a BA, MA, or a PhD. One of these areas is medical and biomedical anthropology, a focus that brings together the strengths of several biological and cultural anthropology faculty mem-bers around issues of global health. Such a track at the undergraduate level will help prepare students for medical school—the MCAT now includes a section on social science—and at the graduate level for work in health-related fields.

Another interdisciplinary focus links applied and public anthropol-ogy, drawing attention to the practical, real-world problems anthro-pologists in our department address. Areas of current research in this specialization include, among others, projects on climate change in the ancient past, as it affects U.S. agriculture today, and its influence on hu-man migrations; development as it affects maternal and infant health among African pastoralists; and a collaboration between anthropolo-gists and Engineers without Borders on Ch’ortí Maya water security.

We are working on developing these and other areas of special-ization because we believe anthropology has much to contribute to understanding the full range of human experience and informing deci-sions we make collectively for the future. Stay tuned for more as we refine and implement our vision for KU anthropology.

Dr. Jane Gibson

3

4 Saying Goodbye to DaveJane Gibson, Chair

Probably few who attended his retirement celebration on December 12, 2013, knew that Prof. David Frayer aimed for a career in archaeology before he became a world-renowned paleoanthropologist. He described what drew him to biological anthropology after his MA in archaeology.

I went to Case Western to do historical archaeology, which I did for a year, then took an osteology class from Milford Wolpoff and switched to work with him, almost immediately. He transferred to Michigan and took me with him. I was his first PhD and his first PhD to re-tire. He is still working. Taking Milford’s class was a great fortune for me and an example how a great teacher can influence a student.

Dave is himself an award-winning teacher with both the TIAA/CREF and Kemper Excellence in Teaching awards to his credit. Between 2009 and 2011, he was a Sigma Xi Distinguished lecturer. Students sing his praises enthusiastically for his courses in osteology, prima-tology, and human evolution. Of course students most enjoy classes instructors like to teach. Here is what says about his teaching.

I complain about it a lot, but teaching has been very rewarding for me and I will miss interacting with students. They are often really, really frustrating, but they keep you young and they never age, with new ones coming in every semester.

Dave’s professional life began when he joined KU’s Department of Anthropology as an assistant professor in August of 1975. He was promoted to full professor in 1990, retired December 31, 2013 and was awarded the status of Professor Emeritus beginning January 1, 2014. He has conducted extensive research in Europe on Neandertal, Upper Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic and Medieval human dental/skeletal material, along with remains from fossil sites in Africa, the Levant, Central Asia and SE Asia. Long-time friend and collaborator Janet Monge described the significance of Dave’s contributions to the field of human evolutionary studies.

Looking over the 100+ publications on David’s vita, I was re-introduced to real high impact research in which he engaged; by dint of quality, interest, insight and hypothesis testing in human evolutionary studies, David has publications in Science, Nature PLOS ONE, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. In our field, these are indeed the highest impact journals and represent the highest quality research. I can think of virtually no one else in the field that can list this among their accomplishments. His work is, in the most real terms, cutting-edge in science and is not “pre-fab” for the publica-tion route, but represents genuine and long-term data collection and hypothesis testing.

In my first graduate seminar on human evolution I was introduced to David’s work. In those early years I read with great interest his work on Gigantopithecus and sexual dimorphism but it was his work on dental evolution in the European Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic that came to prominence for me and influenced my eventual career reading and researching within dental anthropology. Over the years I came to trust the meticulous work presented by David touching on topics from Miocene hominoids to every fossil form in the human lineage in every phase of human evolution. I also came to appreciate his work in skeletal biology, trauma analysis and forensic anthropology. It became clear that the best paleoanthropologists were not only well grounded in evolutionary biology, but were also first-rate human osteologists and bioarchaeologists.

In order to collect data on the fossils that compose the database of human evolution, David has travelled around the world (several times!). He is most famous for his work in Western and Central Europe where he has been engaged in active research for decades. I think that he counts Croatia and Italy as his second and third home. In all of these research travels, David is asked to give

Frayer and Milford Wolpoff in Vienna, 1985.

5 professional papers with his C.V. listing eight full pages of presentations. I have had the pleasure to attend many of these lectures and continue to be amazed at the energy in which he presents the materials, but more importantly the fascinating topics that he addresses in lively, fun, insightful, pertinent and challenging ways.

I recently asked David what part of his professional work brought him the greatest joy. David told me that after years working on Neandertal remains, oftentimes tirelessly opposing band-wagon notions (not quite theories) on the demise of these very modern forms, that his work, as well as the work of others, has been vindicated. That he retires at a time when all of this work comes to fruition is uplifting to many of us who did not sell out to the prevailing masses that preferred to see Neandertals as bumbling idiots wandering around the wasteland of glaciated Europe. He summarizes the state of the art on Neandertals in the New York Times/Herald Tribune op-ed piece published on May 3, 2013. The evidence is overwhelming that Neandertals are a direct part of our human ancestry and that features of modernity emerged within this much maligned group …

Finally, I have had the pleasure of working with David on several projects involving the Krapina Neandertals and in that project I began to witness first hand his incredible level of intellectual generosity. In 2006 David and I began to structure an edited volume in the series published by the Croatian Natural History Museum on “new insights” into the fossils from Krapina to memorialize the 100th anniversary of the excavation of the site. Always the generous scholar, and even though he did the lion’s share of the work, David put me as first author of the volume and he told me that it was more important for me at that stage in my career.

Janet Monge noted that this is not really retirement for Dave. He has a number of projects in various stages of progress. She adds,

He is welcomed all over the world as an insightful and brilliant researcher who is not only contributing to knowledge, but as a goodwill ambassador within the contentious field of human evolutionary studies. David is always building bridges between people and, with great generosity, introducing new younger scholars into the field. He continues to do so no matter what the line on his C.V. indicates as his formal retirement date.

About his new status and the future, Dave says,

I have projects working on a 1 million year old site in Eritrea with my French and Italian colleagues and am involved with a few things in Croatia with the Krapina Neandertals. I am going to Rome in a few weeks and my friends there always have new projects planned for me, so I will be busy for at least the next 2 years.

I will not miss my research, because I am still involved with a number of projects. But research, travel and meeting old and making new friends in Europe, especially, has been rewarding. I really couldn’t have had a better job than KU, with so much freedom to do my research…

I look forward to spending more time with Jeanette, planning dinners, working in the garden and on the house. I will miss my Fraser office and the view, looking west.

We will miss you, Dave, always first to arrive at work in the morning, ever generous and nurturing of students and junior colleagues, dedicated and respected scholar, chef, and friend.

David Frayer and Jeanette Spencer listen as colleaguesoffer tributes to their friend and colleague.

Sandra Gray sings to Jack Hofman’s guitar accompaniment inhonor of David Frayer’s career and retirement.

6

Another book for Allan, His 12th!

Technology and Cultural Tectonics: Shifting Values and MeaningsF. Allan HansonAugust 21, 2013Available at Amazon.com in hardcopy and Kindle

Biologically speaking, everyone has a mother and a father, right? Even when one or both are out of the picture, cultures have developed various strategies for adopting those children into their idea of family and society. In the past few decades genetic technology has changed this equation through development of in vitro fertilization (IVF), sperm and egg donation, and surrogacy. In his new book: Technology and Cultural Tectonics: Shifting Values and Meanings Allan uses this rapidly changing world of legal paternity/maternity as well as prenatal and DNA health screening, GPS tracking, computer forensic science, and DNA identification, to explore how “...technologies produce novel and sometimes jarring realignments among cultural insti-tutions.” Take the case of Luanne Buzzanca, from the chap-ter “Honor Thy Mother(s) and Thy Father(s).” Luanne and her husband, John, were both infertile but wanted a child. A donated sperm and donated egg were implanted into a hired surrogate. Not too many years ago this combina-tion of five “parents” (2 genetic, 1 birth, and 2 intended) would have seemed science fiction but today is not too extraordinary. The contemporary twist to the story oc-curs when Luanne and John divorce before the child is born and John argues in court that he should not be liable for child support.

This case and others are challenging our legal sys-tem to redefine what parenthood means and at a rapidly increasing rate. Shifts in the meaning of family are also be-ing brought about through donor sibling registries, where children with an anonymous genetic parent connect on-line using the identification code of the donor. Our ideas of time as past, present, and future are being changed as we scan our own genetic code for indications of future illness, altering our experience of the present. Likewise we can affect what has already occurred, as DNA testing of incarcerated persons has led to exoneration and a chang-ing of our knowledge of the past. Public versus private space is constantly being challenged by new technologies, as GPS and other surveillance methods create permanent digital records of previously ephemeral footprints. “Taken together, they redefine what it is to be human.” This latest book from Allan follows in the tradition of his previous works on culture change and technology: The Trouble with Culture: How Computers Are Calming the Culture Wars, 2007, and Testing Testing: Social Consequences of the Examined Life, 1993.

Don Stull was in Garden City

7

Don Stull is (im)patiently waiting for two articles to come out. Both have been in press since 2012.

Food Processing Workers. Oxford Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in Politics. Deena Gonzalez and Suzanne Oboler, eds. Oxford Uni-versity Press.

Cows, Pigs, Corporations, and Anthropologists. Journal of Business Anthropology.

In 2013, he gave several invited presentations:

“Bridging the Divide Between Academy and Activism. Dimensions of Political Ecology Conference on Nature/Society.” Presentation in plenary symposium, Lexington, KY, March 2.

“Testimony in Opposition to Senate Bill No. 191, An Act Concerning Agricultural Corporations, Amending KSA 2012.” Kansas Sen-ate Natural Resources Committee Hearing, Topeka, Kans., March 7-8.

“Working Alongside Community Partners in Garden City, Kansas.” Invited workshop presentation at the annual meeting of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, Hall Center for the Humanities, University of Kansas, April 27.

“U.S. Meat Production: Its Industrial Past, Its Contentious Present, Its Uncertain Future” (with M. J. Broadway). World Academy of Science, Engineering, and Technology. Amsterdam, Netherlands, May 15-16. To be published in the conference proceedings.

He also co-organized as a half-day session at the 2013 annual meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology entitled, Scientists and Survivors: Honoring the Legacy of Robert and Beverly Hackenberg, Parts I, II, and III. Denver, Colo., March 22. He presented a paper in that session called The Wisdom and Wit of Bob and Bev Hackenberg: Personal Tales of a Survivor.

Don has been on sabbatical in Garden City in Fall 2013. Funded with a grant from the Spencer Foundation, he has been living in Garden City since the end of July, while conducting ethnographic research on how educators serve the needs of over 7,000 students, of whom 78% of are members of so-called minorities, many of them recent immigrants or refugees, and 71% are eligible for free or reduced-price lunches. This research is the latest in his long-term study of Garden City, where ethnic and linguistic diversity is a defining fea-ture. As with his previous Garden City research, Don is working with a team. The other members are Jennifer Ng, associate professor of education, and Aaron Rife, a doctoral student in education. Aaron is being funded by grants Jennifer and Don received from KU’s General Research Fund. The fieldwork phase will conclude with the end of Garden City’s fall term, December 20. T e a m

members will then return to Lawrence and begin pouring through their many pages of field notes and transcriptions of in-depth in-terviews with teachers, administrators, and community service pro-viders. Don, Jennifer, and Aaron will present preliminary results in March 2014 at annual meeting of the Society for Applied Anthro-pology in a paper titled “Our School Culture Is”: Educators in a Minority-Majority Public School District.

Don has been invited to serve on the Kansas Health Institute’s Kansas Corporate Farming Health Impact Assessment Advisory Panel, which will examine the consequences of concentrated animal feeding operations for the health of individuals and communities. The panel will prepare a report to the state legislature as it consid-ers new legislation to deregulate corporate agriculture in its 2014 session.

Burmese parents and children attending a weekly Learn and Play ses-sion hosted by the Russell Childhood Development Center. Burmese workers have been heavily recruited by Tyson Foods, and about 1,500 Burmese now live in Garden City--214 Burmese are enrolled in the Garden City schools.

Don Stull interviewing princesses and hobgoblins. He gave out over 800 tooth-brushes on Halloween night in Garden City.

Mary Adair’s News from Spooner Hall

8

1. Faculty/Student presentationsMary J. AdairFarming on the High Plains: A Model for the Dismal River Aspect. Invited paper presented at the 71st annual Plains Conference for the Symposium “In with the New and … Out with the Old? New Directions in Dismal River Aspect Research” organized by Sarah Trabert, Loveland Colorado.

Mary Adair, Brendon Asher, Alison Hadley and Jack HofmanPawnee Archaeology: Recent Investigations of the Late Eighteenth century Kansas Monument Site, 14RP1. Paper presented at the 71st annual Plains Conference, Loveland Colorado.

Student presentations:Emily Williams and Jack HofmanA Method for Assessing Confidence in Lithic Material Type Designation, A Case Study of Artifacts from the Nebraska Folsom Database. Poster presented at the 71st annual Plains Conference, Loveland Colorado.

Kauffman, GregStable Isotope Analysis of a Middle Woodland Population from North Central Kansas. Poster presented at the 71st annual Plains Conference, Loveland Colorado.

Hadley, Alison M.Contemporary Perspectives on Pipes from the Past. Paper presented at the 71st annual Plains Conference, Loveland Colorado.

Helped get our data out there – sold numerous volumes of the Publications in Anthropology series at the Plains Conference!

2. Collections CareGraduate Students Emily Williams and Greg Kauffman spent the summer working on an upgrade to the artifact collection from the Turner Casey site, 23JA35. The artifacts were rehoused in 4mil poly bags from their paper bags, provenience information was recorded on acid-free labels placed inside the bag, and duplicate provenience information was written on the outside of the bag. Artifacts are curated by material type. The Late Archaic occupation at the Turner Casey site was impacted by the construction of the Blue Springs Lake in eastern Kansas City, MO. by the Army Corps of Engineers.

Greg Kauffman is currently working on a similar collection upgrade project, this one focused on the Archaic levels at the Snyder site, 14BU9. Excavation at the Snyder site in 1967-1969 revealed three stratigraphically positioned occupations – two associated with the Archaic and one assigned to the local Plains Woodland. The site was inun-dated with the construction of the El Dorado Lake in southcentral Kansas.

3. Fantastic VolunteersUndergraduate Major Alyssa Denneler – creation of a master inventory and database of the ground stone artifacts recovered from the Kansas Monument site

Senior Anthropology Major Grant Berning – data entry of primary artifact catalog data from the 1967-1969 exca-vations at the Snyder site, 14BU9

Former student (graduated in 2012) Joscelin Sanga – continuing a reevaluation of the human remains from burial sites in the lower Republican Valley excavated by Floyd Schultz in the 1920s. Work will be an accurate update for our NAGPRA inventory.

4. FieldworkMary Adair participated in the 10 day field school session at the Kansas Monument site, 14RP1.

9

Some recent titles in the Publications in Anthropology series are listed below, but many older volumes are still available.

Linguistic Anthropology News10

The word to best describe the current research of Linguistic Anthropology at KU has to be technology.Carlos has been hard at work with several publications over the past year, and is lending his talents to the

Anthropology Department’s online presence. In July Carlos published the world’s first dictionary of the Ekegusii language in Mombasa, Kenya followed by a second release in Kisii. Both releases sold out very quickly with most purchases being made by schools in those districts. Ekegusii is a member of the Bantu language family and was the research focus of Carlos’ dissertation at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

With UCSB he is also awaiting the publication of a new textbook, Introduction to Linguistics. Of particular note are the new online teaching modules which Carlos developed with the awarding of an Instructional Im-provement Grant from UCSB. This project is the culmination of work begun in 2006 and is being published by Cambridge in January 2014.

Over the past summer he also designed and taught a new online course at KU: Language and the Internet. Not only did the course fill completely (25 students), but there were waitlist requests. According to Carlos the course was a great success in its trial run. Given the online format and curriculum, in subsequent offerings this course will be easily expanded to accommodate as many students as possible.

We also have Carlos to thank for the redesign and rollout of the new Anthropology Department website. When it goes live in November we will see real time news updates from the department and the university, as well as announcement and calendar improvements to help everyone stay on top of happenings in the depart-ment. The faculty and student information pages will be easier to navigate and search through for prospective students and researchers to find out what our interests are and current research. The redesign gives Anthropol-ogy a new face on the internet, and among the KU community, as a dynamic department with much to offer.

Looking forward, KU will be the host for the 45th Annual Conference on Afri-can Linguistics, to be held April 17-19th, 2014. Carlos is a plenary speaker for this event and the theme is: Africa’s Endangered Languages: Documentary and Theoretical Ap-proaches. More information can be found at http://www.acal45.ku.edu/flyer.html as well as announcements forthcoming via the new department website!

Arienne Dwyer is a Co-Director of the Institute for Digital Research in the Humani-ties (http://idrh.ku.edu/) at KU. The objec-tive of the institute is “...to prepare and sup-port faculty and graduate students as they explore and use computing technology to advance humanistic scholarship across dis-ciplines.” The institute offers workshops as well as 1on1 consultation in both qualitative

and quantitative analysis of digitized data, including text analysis. While so far Arienne and Carlos have made extensive use of the IDRH for their work, the application of these techniques in computing technology to data analysis in all our sub-disciplines is well worth investigating.

As a part of her ongoing research projects Arienne has developed two publicly accessible websites with specialized interfaces which give researchers the ability to query, sort, and analyze large databases of language information. These efforts are the continuation of her many years of work cultivating a research relationship with several educational institutes in the countries of Inner Asia. This relationship is the keystone to her suc-cess in gaining access to the people and languages in the region and makes her work unique and noteworthy in improving our relations with and understanding of China and Central Asia. As such Arienne has three ongoing NSF grants providing funding for the projects, and which support the work of five graduate students: Melanie McKay-Cody, Jeremy Meerkreebs, Giulia Cabras, Gulnar Eziz, and Travis Major.

The Interactive Inner Asia Project (http://iaia.ittc.ku.edu) is focused on the linguistic and cultural convergence of five endangered languages of Inner Asia, a region including China, Mongolia, and Tibet. The interface is a platform for comparative research using language profiles, lexical databases, grammati-cal databases, and a wiki-based discussion platform for collaborative research. Jeremy Meerkreebs and Giulia Cabras are Graduate Research Assistants on the project.

The next is the Uyghur Light Verbs Project (http://uyghur.ittc.ku.edu/). “Light verbs (also termed “auxil-iaries”), express semantic nuances such as speaker intention, irony, and agency.” For theoretical linguists, the use of these light verbs is culturally unique and limited to Georgian, Hindi, Persian, Uyghur, and a few others. While they are used in these languages with a common form and function, Uyghur contains some key differences which could be culturally significant. This project makes available many historical manu-scripts (from the 1600s to present) in a collaborative database for research and analysis directed at un-covering the “...typological development of complex verb construction.” Gulnar Eziz and Travis Major are Graduate Research Assistants on the project.

11

12 Rolfe is Out Therein the Field

In summer 2013, Rolfe Mandel, through the Odyssey program, led excavations at two Kansas archaeological sites – the Scheuerman Mammoth (14SC327) and the Coffey Site (14PO1). Portions of each site have been excavated in past years, but this summer’s fieldwork proves that there is still much more to learn from each of these sites. On November 1, as a part of the Explorations in Archaeology series of lectures, Rolfe discussed the history of excavations at these sites as well as the new information gathered during this summer’s field season.

The Scheuerman Mammoth site is in Scott County and lies on the edge of the Smoky Hill River valley. Rolfe notes that it is a rather uncommon location for a mammoth or for humans, since there are no active springs in the area. However, after pieces of bone

became exposed in 2011, Rolfe discovered human-made chipped stone flakes in the vicinity. The knapping pile was not found in direct association with the mammoth skeleton, but they do seem to be the same age as the mammoth, which has been dated to roughly 13,500 BP. This date is incred-ibly significant because it predates Clovis people, who were long thought to be the first inhabitants of the Americas. Excavations were done with the hope of uncovering even more evidence for a possible pre-Clovis oc-cupation. The crew uncovered more of the mammoth skeleton than before and surveyed the landscape using ground-penetrating radar. There is still much more of the mammoth skeleton to be uncovered. Furthermore, the results from GPR survey could potentially warrant more excavations at the site. Certainly, as Rolfe suggests, there is much more to do from the Schererman Mammoth site.

Rolfe also worked at the Coffey site in Pottawatomie County. The site is located along the Big Blue River, and unfortunately has fallen victim to erosion over time due to the meandering of the river. On the positive side, this erosion has allowed Rolfe to observe newly exposed soil profiles and artifacts coming out of the cutbank. The newly revealed cutbank has allowed Rolfe to identify a late Pleistocene era soil deposit (around 14,000 BP) with associated artifacts. Like the Scheuerman Mammoth, the Coffey site therefore could potentially turn up a pre-Clovis component. The site has provided information since the 1970’s, when a variety of well-dated artifacts and features from pre-ceramic occupations were discovered. The site is entered in the National Register of Historic Places based on its po-tential to yield even more information about prehistory. Rolfe says there is a possibility that the placement of these artifacts is merely attributed to

disturbances in the soil, but he believes that the pre-Clovis potential is still there.Rolfe’s work this summer

focused on the newly exposed cutbank. The team dug all along its edge, hoping to find more evidence for a pre-Clovis occu-pation. Excavations uncovered Paleoindian artifacts, namely Fol-som and Plainview/Goshen. More artifacts were discovered below these, adding to the intrigue of a possibly very old occupation. The pre-Clovis question was not conclusively answered, but certainly this discovery warrants even more investigation of the site. Rolfe intends to do just that, with plans to revisit the site in the future. The possibility of identifying pre-Clovis occupations at both the Coffey site and the Scheuerman Mammoth site

is exciting, and with Rolfe’s plans to investigate both in the future, there is certainly potential for some remarkable new discoveries at these sites as well as the new information gathered during this summer’s field season.

Presentations by Faculty and Graduate Students at Professional Meetings

13

PaleoAmerican Odessey,Santa Fe (October 16-19)

Asher, Brendon P. (University of Kansas) and Jack L. Hofman (University of Kansas): Testing Clovis and Folsom Ubiquity from the Continental Divide to the Plains/Woodland Border.

Rolfe D. Mandel (University of Kansas): A Geoarchaeological Approach to the Search for Pre-Clovis Sites in North America: An Example from the Central Plains.

Fred Sellet (University of Kansas), Rob-ert Brunswig (University of Northern Colorado) and Rolfe Mandel (Univer-sity of Kansas): The Paleoenvironmental and Archaeological Context of the Late Pleistocene-Early Holocene Transition at the KibRidge Site.

Plains Anthropological Conference, Colorado State (October 2-6)

Adair, Mary J. (University of Kan-sas): Farming on the High Plains: A Model for the Dismal River Aspect.

Adair, Mary J. (University of Kansas), Brendon P. Asher (University of Kan-sas), Alison M. Hadley (University of Kansas), and Jack L. Hofman (University of Kansas): Pawnee Archaeology: Recent Investigations of the late Eighteenth Century Kansas Monument Site, 14RP1.

Hadley, Alison M. (University of Kansas): Contemporary Perspectives on Pipes from the Past.

Kauffman, Greg (University of Kansas): Stable Isotope Analysis of a Middle Woodland Population from North Central Kansas.

Schneider, Blair (University of Kansas), Steven De Vore (National Park Service, Midwest Archeological Center), and Jay Sturdevant (National Park Service, Midwest Archeological Center): Geophysical Surveys at the Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site: Comparing Forty Years of Magnetic Data.

Williams, Emily G. (University of Kansas) and Jack L. Hofman (Univer-sity of Kansas): A Method for Assessing Confidence in Lithic Material Type Designation, A Case Study of Artifacts from the Nebraska Folsom Database.Stable Isotope Analysis of a Middle Woodland Population from North Central Kansas

American Anthropological Association, Annual Meeting, Chicago (November 20-24)

Andrea Clark (University of Kansas) “Using Visual Ethnography to Capture Embodied Experi-ences of Urban Mobilities.”

Bartholomew C. Dean (University of Kansas) Anthropology of Mobility Keyword: Freedom.Kristina S Eronat (University of Kansas) Reexamining the Past: New Studies of Data from

Avocational Archaeology of the 19th and Early 20th Century.Jane W Gibson (University of Kansas) and Benjamin J Gray (University of Kansas) Climate Change and Rural Communities in

Western Kansas.John Janzen (University of Kansas) “Health is Rejoicing in One’s Body.” The Social Reproduction of Health in Lower Congo

(DRC).F. Allan Hanson (University of Kansas) Donor Insemination and Family Relationships: A Social Consequence of Technology.Jeremy William Meerkreebs (University of Kansas) What I’m Driving at: Ethnography, Talk, and the Mobile Workplace.Lauren Renée Moore (University of Kansas) Precarious Lives, Restrictive Diets: Asserting Agency and Challenging Biomedicine

Through the Treatment of Perceived Food Intolerances.Akiko Takeyama (University of Kansas) Broken Promises and a Re-Imagined Future in New Millennial Japan.Akiko Takeyama (University of Kansas), Discussant: Lovers, Activists and Students: Youth Agency and Resistance in East Asia.Meghan Farley Webb (University of Kansas) Contemporary Kaqchikel Social Agency: Men’s Transnational Migrations and Wom-

en’s Participation in Auxilaturas.Meghan Farley Webb (University of Kansas), Chair: Finding a Voice: Latin American Indigenous Women’s Participation within

and at Odds with Indigenous Organizations and the Indigenous Movement.

Date Event

September 6 “Causes and consequences of human migration: Evolutionary perspective”

Michael H. Crawford (University of Kansas, Anthropology & Genetics)

September 20 “Plague migration and human activities” Townsend Peterson (University of Kansas, Ecology and

Evolutionary Biology)

October 4 “Domestic service, migration and urbanization in Latin American, 1850 to the present”

Elizabeth Kuznesof (University of Kansas, History)

October 21 “A tale of three continents: How African slavery & East-Indian indentured migration helped shape the human population of Limon, Costa Rica”

Lorena Madrigal (University of South Florida, Anthropology)

November 1 “Tracing Central Eurasian migrations through language” Adrienne Dwyer (University of Kansas, Anthropology)

November 15 “Leaving to Tangiers: Notes of European migration to Africa” Majid Hannoum (University of Kansas, Anthropology)

December 6 “Creole languages and migration” Anita Herzfeld (University of Kansas, Latin American Studies)

14 Human MigrationLecture Series - Fall 2013

15

With this column, we inaugurate a new series for the KU Anthropology Newsletter, one that profiles alumni from our program so we can see how anthropology has influenced their lives and find out what they’re doing today. If you have a story to tell, please let us hear from you! You can contact us by email at kuanthro@ku.edu.

We begin with Alan R. Davis who received his BA in anthropology with a double major in geography in 1971. It is especially fitting that we begin with Alan because it gives us a chance to thank him and his wife, Dr. Jennifer Allen, for their generous planned gift to the Department of Anthropology. This gift is unrestricted and will some day help us continue the work we do to illuminate the human experience, solve significant real-world problems, and train others to do likewise. Alan Davis says he has been very blessed in his life. He lived his first ten years in Boston, moved to Chicago, and eventually wound up in Kansas where he thought he would pursue a degree in chemistry. Three semesters later, he had come to realize that chemistry wasn’t for him, so he switched to the study of anthropology and geography. His favorite courses included North American archaeology, North American Indians, and Principles of Archaeology, courses he took with Professors Alfred Johnson and Carlisle Smith. In a phone conversation with department chair Jane Gibson, Alan wondered what his life might have been like if he’d been accepted to participate in a summer dig. Alas, that program was looking for graduate students with excavation experience, so Alan finished his degree in anthropology and geography and moved to Houston where he earned his MA in accounting and launched a career in healthcare finance that took him to Chillicothe, Ohio. There he worked until

recently as the CFO of the regional healthcare system. He remains busy and interested in many things, among them glass etching, his ten grandchildren, and performing his civic duty as president of the Chillicothe City Council. With a career in finance and a diversity of interests and activities, it seemed a reasonable question to ask Alan why he and his wife Jennifer decided to make a bequest to KU’s Department of Anthropology. He explained that when thinking about what to do in College, he received some advice--“Get a good liberal arts education. Learn how to learn. Then spe-cialize.” Alan followed that advice in coming to KU and believes the fields he chose helped him to “put things in perspec-tive.” Even in the field of finance, he says he’s the big picture thinker bringing a broader perspective to his work. So now he says he wants to give something back. Alan has very fond memories of KU anthropology and KU which he attended at a volatile time. He was among the non-participants who watched the Kansas Union burn in the spring of 1970. Over the years, Alan has maintained an interest in archaeology, reading about recent finds in National Geographic, for example. He recently attended a local meeting for the preservation of Native American earthworks in the Hopewell tradition. In Southern Ohio some 2000 years ago, in and around where Chillicothe sits today, a sophisticated indigenous culture with firm command of mathematics and astronomy arose and lasted for hundreds of years. They built enormous ceremonial complexes, many of which have been nearly erased by economic development and agriculture in modern times. Now that he has retired from his career in healthcare finance, Alan›s early intellectual passion for archaeology may bear fruit. He says he is just beginning what may become a more significant involvement in this preservation project.

News from Another Successful AlumnusJohn Gurche, 2013 CLAS Distinguished Alumnus Award winner, had an article about him the Boston Globe (http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2013/11/03/john-gurche-hominid-sculptor/8fVd8dsBuoOV3IX1as5iSM/story.html). It centers on his work and was triggered by his forthcoming book (Shaping Humanity: How Science, Art, and Imagina-tion Help Us Understand Our Origins) and the opening of a 15 sculpture exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution Hall of Human Origins. He was also featured in Discover (http://discovermagazine.com/galleries/2013/dec/paleoartist-reconstructs-human-ancestors#.Usr0qYVYVLd) and has a new book out, Shaping Humanity.

Alumni News

KU Anthropology graduate Alan R. Davisand his wife Dr. Jennifer Allen.

We are grateful for the continuing support of our donors. Please consider a dona-tion or a bequest to the Department of Anthropology to support students and help strengthen the unique educational benefits that the department offers.

Checks may be made out to “KUEA–Anthropology Dept.” Write on the memo “For Anthropology Dept. programs” and send to Gift Processing Department, KU Endowment, PO Box 928, Lawrence, KS 66044-0928. You can also donate online, by contacting KU Endowment [http://www.kuendowment.org], specifying Anthropology. If you would like to discuss setting up a fund in honor of a special person or for a particular purpose, please call Jane at (785) 864-2635 or write her at jwgc@ku.edu or the mailing address above.

Send us your news

We are always interested to hear from alumni and learn what you are doing. We want to include more alumni news in KU Anthropologist. So, please keep us informed, stay in touch, and send your news to either Le-Thu Erazmus at lerazmus@ku.edu or John Hoopes hoopes@ku.edu. Be sure to include your phone number so we can contact you.

You can also mail us at:

KU Anthropologist - Le-Thu ErazmusDepartment of AnthropologyUniversity of Kansas Fraser Hall - Room 6221415 Jayhawk BlvdLawrence, Kansas 66045-7556

Support Your Department

Newsletter staff

Sarah AldenMichael Davis

Allison DouglasWesley GibsonElizabeth Nech

David Frayer, faculty advisor

16