CU ANTHROPOLOGY Endowments and Awards University of Colorado Boulder Forever Anthropologists and Alumni News
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IN THIS ISSUE CU ANTHROPOLOGY New Faculty Endowments and Awards University of Colorado Boulder Forever Anthropologists and Alumni News ALUMNI NEWS Anthropology Publications SUMMER 2013 Food and Travel Section Back issues of our alumni newsletters can be accessed at: Matters of Degree http://www.colorado.edu/Anthropology/news/newsletters.html Public Events Becoming Human...all over again The Fantastic and the Banal: Are we our own worst enemies? Rethinking Bureaucratic Authority Extinction, in its biological and cultural A Graduate Student Conference forms, was the focus of an Anthropolo- September 27 & 28 gy graduate seminar that co-instructors For information and for conference updates, please Paul Shankman and Michelle Sauther visit our website at http:// opened to the public and which then rethinkingbureaucracy.tumblr.com/. caught the attention of a reporter at the While we cannot provide funds for travel, most meals will be included, and free housing may be Coloradan. See the full story at http:// available with anthropology graduate students. www.coloradanmagazine.org/2013/06/01/extinction/ Exhibits As Sauther and Shankman reminded us, extinction and evolution Next time you’re in Boulder... can be counted on to make novel bedfellows. Take the unex- pected detail Matt Sponheimer drilled from his latest menu of Maintaining Pastoral Identity in a Changing World: paleodentition studies : The Turkana and Maasai People of East Africa A new look at the diets of ancient African hominids shows a The Institute of Behavioral Science is pleased to an- “game changer” occurred about 3.5 million years ago when some nounce a research exhibit featuring the work of members added grasses or sedges to their menus…Despite the J. Terrence McCabe, Professor of Anthropology and fact that grasses and sedges were readily available Director of the Environment and Society Program at back then, the hominids seem to have ignored IBS. More about this exhibit on page 9. them for an extended period…[I’d rather die than be on THAT Paleo diet?]… “We don’t know Ancient Southwest: Peoples, Pottery and Place Curated by Steve Lekson, this exhibition features exactly what happened,” said Sponheimer. more than 100 rarely exhibited ceramics from the “But we do know that… some of these hominids museum's celebrated southwestern collection and started to eat things that they did not eat be- takes visitors through more than 1000 years (AD 500- fore, and it is quite possible that these changes in 1600) of southwestern history. Photographs of an- diet were an important step in becoming human...” cient southwestern ruins by noted aerial photogra- —Jim Scott, CU-Boulder media relations. pher Adriel Heisey provide a visual and dramatic Also available on BBC , MSNBC, and other major news outlets. Links on page 10. frame of reference for the exhibition. See link below. With the advent of the MOOC*, the extinction of Higher Ed -As We To Feel the Earth: Moccasin Exhibition -Know-It is even a topic of speculation, including a special report CU Museum of Natural History, Anthropology Hall on “Learning in the Digital Age” in the August Scientific American. Curated by Cynthia Chavez Lamar, PhD, Director Indi- While the rest of the world is coming to recognize the value of a an Arts Research Center and Kendall Tallmadge, CU liberal arts education, the U.S. is experiencing skyrocketing tuition Anthropology Graduate Student. Produced in collab- costs and a shortage of highly-skilled labor. These converging oration with Native American artists specializing in pressures are pushing businesses to find new ways to both train contemporary moccasin making. Details on page 9. and measure mastery among potential employees. How they will Exhibit details for the CU Museum at: http:// deliver is the question. cumuseum.colorado.edu/exhibits/current-exhibits *Massive Open Online Course, “...an educational delivery system that has the potential to revolutionize higher education …” See CU President Benson’s letter at https://www.cusys.edu/presnews/2013/06/ 1 New Faculty Associate Professor Robin M. Bernstein We made a real coup with the hire of Dr. Robin Bernstein, who comes to us from George Washington University, where she was Assistant Professor of Anthropology and of Anatomy and Regenerative Biology. She is also a Research Collaborator at the National Museum of Natural History and a Research Associate at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her expertise lies in human and non-human primate growth and development; de- velopmental, reproductive, and behavioral endocrinology, and lactation biology. Dr. Bernstein uses tools and approaches from endocrinology to investigate how physio- logical mechanisms mediate evolutionary processes. Her current research centers on bioactive factors in breast milk and their role in mediating maternal effects on infant growth and development, in humans and nonhuman primates. http://humanorigins.si.edu/about/events/scientist-dr-robin-bernstein Dr. Bernstein has numerous professional papers to her credit. CV: http://www.colorado.edu/anthropology/people/bios/bernstein.html Assistant Professor Scott G. Ortman Dr. Scott Ortman will be joining us from his post as Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute and as a Lightfoot Fellow at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center. We are truly fortunate to have this young star among us, with an impressive set of credentials including: 2010 Arizona State University. PhD in Anthropology, School of Human Evolution and Social Change. His dissertation: Genes, Language and Culture in Tewa Ethnogenesis, A.D. 1150-1400, won the 2011 Society for American Archaeology Dissertation Award and his first book was given the University of Utah Press’ annual prize for excellence in substantive research and quality writing on the human experience in the American West: Ortman, Scott G. (2012). Winds from the North: Tewa Origins and Historical Anthropology. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City. http://www.uofupress.com Find out more about Scott Ortman at: http://www.santafe.edu/media/staff_cvs/Ortman_Vita_011012.pdf Dr. Christian S. Hammons will be joining us as an Instructor for the next three years. Christian is a prodigal son and a spectacular example of the talent currently available to academe. He will be a won- derful addition to our teaching faculty and temporarily fill the void created by our retiring scions. He holds a PhD in Anthropology and an MFA in Film Production from the University of Southern California and graduated with a BA summa cum laude in Anthropology from the University of Colorado Boulder in 1992. Dr. James Loudon (PhD ‘09) will be leaving us for a tenure-track position in the East Carolina University Depart- ment of Anthropology. Three cheers for James! We will miss him and his wildly popular, wildly oversized lectures in Physical Anthropology. 2 Long Term Ecological Research Network Terry McCabe participated in the NSF’s 2012 All Scientists Meeting of the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Net- work in Estes Park last September… “to make the case for integrating more anthropologists into the study of ecosys- tems.” The NSF created the LTER Network in 1980 to support long-term research of ecosystems with the understand- ing that many ecosystem processes can only be studied through long-term research. Sites were selected to represent major ecosystem types or natural biomes across the US (there are now also a few international LTER sites). It is one of the most highly funded NSF programs. There is a growing recognition among ecologists that they need to grapple with the human impacts on ecosystems and that the old model of studying isolated and protected reserves to understand ecosystems is no longer valid...However, there are few ecological models that satisfactorily incorporate human complexity. Ecologists may study ecosystem processes at the micro-scale and then jump to the global macro-scale, eg, measuring the impact of global warming on these processes, thus skipping the local, regional, and national scales at which human activities more directly affect ecosystem pro- cesses in myriad ways. This offers opportunities for anthropologists who study complex social-ecological systems using a holistic approach and making linkages across these spatiotem- poral scales. Moreover, anthropologists are no strangers to long-term research as many are involved in ethnographic research in one site over multiple decades... —-Excerpted from Anthropology News on the Web at: http://www.anthropologynews.org/index.php/2013/03/01/anthropologists-at-the-all- scientists-meeting-of-the-long-term-ecological-research-network/ A Fond Farewell to an Old Friend Professor Emeritus Linda Cordell Our longtime colleague in Anthropology, the CU Museum, and more recently, Senior Scholar at the Santa Fe Institute, was found at her desk March 31, peacefully working on a manuscript. She is sorely missed already, both professionally and personally. Please see her bio at SAR: http://sarweb.org/? senior_scholar_linda_s_cordell: In 1992, Linda joined the faculty of the University of Colorado, Boulder as Director of the University of Colorado Museum… and Professor of Anthropology. She served at Colorado until June 2005...she was appointed to the Exter- nal Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute in 2010 and was a keynote speaker at their Spring Science Council Meeting in April 2011. Linda was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences in 2005..awarded the A. V. Kidder medal for eminence in American Archaeology by the American Anthropological Association—the second woman to have won the Kidder medal in its 60 years of existence. Linda was also awarded the Byron S. Cummings Award by the Arizona Archaeological and Historical Society in 2004… Fare thee well, Linda. Her obituary appeared April 1in the Santa Fe New Mexican http://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/article_48c218ab-ee13-54fa- ae0c-620157ee619b.html? fb_action_ids=10101436602773423&fb_action_types=og.recommends 3 New Titles in Anthropology Early Hominin Paleoecology Matt Sponheimer, Julia Lee-Thorp, Kaye Reed, Peter Ungar, Eds.