Anthropology Newsletter

Camile Bernier plans to return to campus this Fall to resume work on her dissertation entitled:  "Performance, Print and Prose, Recovering Contexts of Ojibwe Narratives."  A paper by the same title will be published in 2004 in a collection of MSU American Indian Graduate Student Conference Proceedings.

Brad Chase spent the winter and spring of 2003 conducting a second season of ethnoarchaeological fieldwork in Bathinda in the Indian Punjab where he was hanging out with butchers, collecting bones from them, and doing excavations of their shops.  Great information and great fun were the result.  He presented on his work at the conference of the European Association of South Asian Archaeologists in Bonn, Germany in July and is continuing to use what he learned to develop plausible and testable models that will be used to guide the interpretation of animal bones from the site of Harappa in the Pakistani Punjab, a project co-directed by our own J. Mark Kenoyer and Richard Meadow of Harvard's Peabody Museum.

Butcher from Bathinda, with goat-heads and feet waiting to be made into soup.

During the fall semester of the 2002-2003 school year, Lane Fargher continued his dissertation research on the prehispanic economy of the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico.  Beginning in the middle of August, Lane returned to Mitla, Oaxaca, for one month, to finish analyzing the artifacts collected during the Spring 2002 field season.  This field season included intensive survey and mapping at three sites in the Valley of Oaxaca, Estaa lo guee, Yaniche, and Gaii Guii.  Both Estaa lo guee and Yaniche are hilltop sites located on the southern edge of the valley.  Gaii Guii is a valley floor site located in the middle of the Tlacolula arm of the valley about two kilometers west of the modern village of Tlacolula.

            The laboratory work included some final ceramic analysis, and drawing and photography of a sample of artifacts collected during the survey.  In total, Lane collected about 25,000 artifacts during his project making it impossible to photograph and draw each specimen.  Once the artifact drawings and photographs were completed, Lane returned to Madison and focused on writing his dissertation.  He plans to defend his dissertation during the upcoming fall semester.

Tori Jennings - My research that began at Colorado State University focusing on behavioral adaptation to climate variability in the northern Great Plains recently took a new direction. While working on a forthcoming article for Culture & Agriculture titled øFarm Family Adaptability and Climate Variability in the Northern Great Plains: Contemplating the Role of Meaning in Climate Change Research,Ó I discovered my own interest in interpretive and humanistic approaches to global climate change. Building from my ethnographic study of farmers and ranchers in North and South Dakota, my dissertation project will explore the subjective cultural meanings of weather and climate in Cornwall, England. The largely rural farming region of Cornwall, combined with its rich history of Cornish folklore, weatherlore, and magic makes this site especially promising. This dissertation project slated to begin January 2004, reflects my interest in ecological and historical anthropology, landscape, family farming, and Western thought.

Randy Law - Fieldwork in Pakistan and India, Winter and Spring 2002-2003

My dissertation project involves locating the sources of rock and mineral artifacts excavated at the Indus Civilization site of Harappa. What follows is a brief summary of my first period of fieldwork since completing extensive sampling of rock and mineral sources in Pakistan in August of 2001.

I left for India immediately following the Fall 2002 semester. I crossed into Pakistan on foot at Wagah (near Lahore - the only point along the border open at that time) and joined Prof. Kenoyer at Harappa for few weeks in order to do detailed studies rock and mineral manufacturing debris during past seasons. Returning to India in mid-January, I made my way to Gujarat and M.S. University at Baroda. From there Arun Malik (an archaeology graduate student) and I did a brief survey of sites in the southern part of the Little Rann of Kutch and then joined other members of M.S.U.'s Department of Archaeology at their excavations at the Indus period site of Bagasara on the Saurashtra peninsula. I met up with Brad Chase at Bagasara and for a period we traveled together in Gujarat and Rajasthan visiting sites (the Archaeological Survey of India's excavations at Dholavira), meeting butchers, bead-makers, and collecting rock and mineral samples around the region. In February, Brad moved on to his own project in the Punjab and I intensified my sampling trips in Gujarat and Rajasthan. Over the next six-weeks, both alone and with members of M.S. University such as Dr. Kuldeep Bhan and Kishore Ragubhans, I sampled ochre, limestone, and jasper deposits of the Kutch and Saurashtra regions of Gujarat, the extensive lead and steatite deposits of southern Rajasthan, and the steatite and copper deposits of northern Rajasthan. Sampling trips were also made to the agate mines of Ratanpur and the remote agate deposit on Mardak bet within the Little Rann of Kutch. All the while I visited and documented stone artifacts and debris at as many proto-historic sites in the region as possible. I returned to the States with overweight bags in late-March.

In early May I returned to India and after a brief visit to some minor agate and steatite deposits in eastern Gujarat, I focused on survey and collection northwestern India. I stayed away from the plains, where pre-monsoon temperatures were regularly hitting 120° F, as much as possible during this time. Over the next two months I traveled through the foothills and mountains of Uttaranchal, Himachal Pradesh, and Jammu collecting steatite, lead, chert and other minerals. Before I left India in early July, the monsoons had come and cooled Haryana and the Punjab to the point that I was able to make a productive survey of important proto-historic sites and grindingstone sources of those regions.

Randy Law, Brad Chase, Manoj Saxena and Navratna Pattak.

David Meiggs worked with Prof. William Aylward from the Classics Department at the classical site of Zeugma in southeastern Turkey,during the summer 2002, He assisted in the process of publishing the much-publicized rescue excavations there in 2000. After spending five weeks in the southeast, he traveled to Çatalhöyük, a Neolithic (approx. 7500-5500 BC) mound in central Turkey, to obtain pilot study samples for his dissertation project. The project involves analyzing ancient human and animal bones isotopically to investigate patterns of prehistoric mobility at a crucial time in the spread of farming in the Near East. In January 2003, David successfully passed his Preliminary Examination for the project with his proposal Tracking Mobility in Anatolia: a case study at Çatalhöyük. The pilot study provided some interesting results, and David presented these at the UK Archaeological Science conference in Oxford, England in April, 2003. Currently, David is applying for grants to begin his dissertation research in earnest and anticipates going to Turkey in 2004 to collect animal samples from around the country and ancient human bones and teeth from museums and excavations.

Steve Wernke has spent the last year writing his dissertation, entitled øAn Archaeo-History of Andean Community and Landscape: The Late Prehispanic and Early Colonial Colca Valley, Peru.Ó  After spending a year in Washington DC on a fellowship in precolumbian studies at Dumbarton Oaks, Steve squeezed in some follow-up field- and labwork in Peru during July and August, 2002.  In the field, he mapped a late prehispanic fortification registered during his survey in the Colca valley (southern highland Peru).  He also reconnected with old friends and compadres at the climax of the annual canal-cleaning festival for the community of Yanque Urinsaya (see photo).  This is an arduous, four day expedition into altitudes of over 16,000 feet to the glacial source waters of the ancient, 35 kilometer long canaläan undertaking which requires the mobilization of the entire community.  Steve participated in this canal cleaning in 1997 and 1999, mapping the canal and video-documenting the organization of labor, as well as the fertility rituals enacted at sacred water sources along the length of the canal. 

      In the lab, he completed data entry from the two large colonial censuses that are the centerpieces of the ethnohistorical portion of the dissertation.  These record over 8000 agricultural fields that have been mapped out in GIS to understand local and regional scale land-use patterning.  Steve received a UW Advanced Dissertator Fellowship for the 2002-2003 academic year.

Officials parading in regalia at the end of the canal-cleaning festival, Yanque Urinsaya.