The Department of Anthropology’s annual undergraduate research symposium and showcase takes place on March 28th from 6:30 P.M. to 8:30 P.M. in room 103 in Erickson Hall. Parents are welcome, too!
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Featured Staff, Roxanne Moran
Roxanne Moran The Department of Anthropology is delighted to feature Roxanne Moran, who has been working in the department for sixteen years. Roxanne began her career at Michigan State University in March 2001. She initially worked as a teller in the Cashier’s office, then moved to Contracts & Grants. In 2006, Roxanne joined the Department of Anthropology as an Office Assistant III. Since then, she has been helping the faculty, staff, and students of the Anthropology department with various tasks such as handling the accounting and student payroll processes as well as processing expense and travel reimbursements within the department.
Roxanne also handles purchasing equipment at faculty requests, orders office supplies, and maintains the department’s ledger records. Whenever people walk into the department, Roxanne greets them, answers their questions, or directs them to where they need to be. Roxanne is also responsible for course scheduling and various procedures involving undergraduate students and their classes.
When asked about her experience working at the Department of Anthropology, Roxanne said, “the opportunity to work with some of the most talented and dedicated people in the Anthropology department makes me very proud to be a part of this department. We work together as a team through good times and the hard times. We support each other in the best and worst circumstances, no matter when they happen. I’m very thankful to have been able to devote so many years to a department that I love.”
Dr. Todd Fenton, Department of Anthropology Chair and Professor, admires the dedicated service that Roxanne has been providing the Department of Anthropology and MSU, noting that “we are incredibly fortunate to have Roxanne working in our department, and I am thankful to her for the indispensable support she provides to our faculty, students, and to the smooth functioning of the department. Working with Roxanne is always a pleasure, and I look forward to continuing working with Roxanne in the years to come.”
When not at work, Roxanne loves spending time with her family, especially her very energetic grandsons Eddie and Kenny, who are constantly on the go. She also loves to travel, thrift shop, refinish old furniture, and train her labradoodle puppy, Gus.
The fact that Roxanne comes from a musical family means she is often watching her husband, her sons, and her daughter play music at parties or in local establishments. Talking about her musical family she said, “last year will always be remembered as the year that my oldest son, Jacob Moran, who was a contestant on American Idol, made it to the top 14 and competed for the title! The journey far exceeded his expectation.”
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New Graduate Program Director, Dr. Stacey Camp
Dr. Stacey Camp The Department of Anthropology is pleased to announce that Associate Professor and the Director of the MSU Campus Archaeology Program, Dr. Stacey Camp is our new Graduate Program Director. Dr. Camp sees this as an excellent opportunity to get to know incoming students and help graduate students navigate their academic programs. Dr. Camp has been in administrative roles since 2013. She enjoys solving problems and finding solutions for her colleagues, staff, and students and the opportunity to promote what her students and colleagues are doing to the wider university audience.
Dr. Camp joined MSU as an associate professor of anthropology in 2017, but she was already familiar with the department before being hired. She was a visiting National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) fellow at MSU in the summers of 2015 and 2016. During those two summers, she got to know Dr. Ethan Watrall and Dr. Lynne Goldstein, who were directing the NEH institute on digital archaeology that she was attending. One of Dr. Camp’s favorite things about the anthropology department is the great staff who care deeply about our students and faculty. She says, “we are really lucky to have them on our team.” She also appreciates the collegiality and sense that everyone works together for a common purpose. She said, “Everyone has been so kind to me since coming here.”
Before coming to MSU, Dr. Camp spent nine years as a faculty member, administrator, and director of a federal archaeological repository at the University of Idaho. She says, “Moving from rural Idaho to suburban East Lansing was definitely a big cultural shift, but my MSU colleagues made the transition easier for my family.” In Idaho, she worked in a department comprised of multiple academic fields – criminology, sociology, and anthropology. She says, “there were not a lot of anthropologists in my department. At MSU, I really appreciate being in a large anthropology department with anthropologists from all sub-disciplines in a college dedicated to the social sciences.”
Dr. Camp first learned about anthropology in high school while volunteering at a museum. She says, “I really enjoyed working with the public, so I took anthropology courses my first semester at Occidental College (“Oxy”) in Los Angeles. I was immediately hooked”. She lovingly remembers her fantastic professors and mentors at Oxy, including Dr. Elizabeth Chin (now editor-in-chief of American Anthropologist), Dr. Robin Sewell, and Dr. Jeff Tobin. While at Oxy, she attended her first archaeological field school in Ireland, directed by Illinois State University’s Dr. Charles E. Orser. She says, “I was fascinated by his community-based approach to archaeology, which is why I decided to pursue the sub-discipline of historical archaeology.”
Dr. Camp’s archaeological research explores what citizenship and national belonging mean to communities who have been actively denied and/or dispossessed of legal and/or cultural citizenship. She looks at how these communities respond to exclusion and racism through archaeology. “Archaeology can reveal what people consumed in the past, such as what they ate or purchased. Historically dispossessed or disenfranchised communities have used consumerism to claim citizenship and national identity,” says Dr. Camp. Dr. Camp’s research has also investigated the politics of the past and what it means to preserve, curate, and present artifacts. Early in her career, she studied how government-run museums in Ireland privileged the country’s prehistory to the neglect of more contested, difficult histories, such as the Great Famine and British colonization. She continues to write about the silences and absences in museums and history books. She has a book chapter coming out next year that reviews an exhibit on civil rights and racism in American history at The Henry Ford.
Outside of academia, Dr. Camp loves spending time outdoors, hiking, cross-country skiing, kayaking, and skiing here in Michigan with her husband and two children. She said, “I was a figure skater for most of my young life and coached on the side for many years up until moving to Michigan. I still figure-skate over at the Munn Ice Arena on the weekends”.
On the horizon, Dr. Camp is working on a collaborative project that explores the materiality and artwork of the COVID-19 pandemic that involves two archaeologists besides her and a cultural anthropologist. They recently published in the Journal of Contemporary Archaeology last year an article titled “Private Struggles in Public Spaces: Documenting COVID-19 Material Culture and Landscapes”. The team is currently working on two articles related to this project. One examines what it means to curate and preserve materiality associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, and the other looks at how archaeological and ethnographic methods shifted to accommodate the ephemeral nature of materiality and artwork displayed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Department of Anthropology Graduate Student Publications: 2022
Graduate students in the Department of Anthropology are often able to begin publishing their research in academic journals before graduating. Congratulations to our graduate students on their publications in 2022! The names of the graduate students are in bold, and the names of Anthropology faculty members are underlined.
Biggs, Jack. A., Jeffrey J. Burnett, Rhian R. Dunn, Emily B. P. Milton, and Amber M. Plemons. 2022. “The Campus Archaeology Program at Michigan State University: Reevaluating Our Program during a Pandemic.” SAA Archaeological Record, 22(2):17-21. https://mydigitalpublication.com/publication/?m=16146&i=740794&p=18&ver=html5.
Burnett, Jeffrey J. 2022. “Seeking Radical Solidarity in Heritage Studies: Exploring the Intersection of Black Feminist Archaeologies and Geographies in Oak Bluffs, MA.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 26: 53-78. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10761-021-00601-y.
Dunn, Rhian R., Andrea Zurek-Ost, Paige Lynch, and Carrie Bohne Warren. 2022. “Dennis C. Dirkmaat, Ph.D., D-ABFA: A Brief Visit with an Influential Forensic Anthropologist.” Forensic Anthropology. https://doi.org/10.5744/fa.2021.0030.
Gerloff, Grace Shu. 2022. “Beyond Feelings: What’s Missing from Trauma-Centered Adoption Narratives.” Adoption and Culture 10, no. 2: 1-3. https://doi.org/10.1353/ado.0.0016.
Goots, Alexis, Mariyam I. Isa, Todd W. Fenton, and Feng Wei. 2022. “Blunt Force Trauma in the Human Mandible: An Experimental Investigation.” Forensic Science International: Reports 5. 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fsir.2021.100252.
Milton, Emily B. P., Nathan D. Stansell, Hervé Bocherens, Annalis Brownlee, Döbereiner Chala-Aldana, and Kurt Rademaker. 2022. “Examining Surface Water δ18O and δ2H Values in the Western Central Andes: A Watershed Moment for Anthropological Mobility Studies.” Journal of Archaeological Science 146: 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2022.105655.
Spiros, Micayla C., Amber M. Plemons, and Jack A. Biggs. 2022. “Pedagogical Access and Ethical Considerations in Forensic Anthropology and Bioarchaeology.” Science & Justice 62, no. 6: 708-720. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scijus.2022.03.008.
Spiros, Micayla C., Sherry Nakhaeizadeh, Tim Thompson, Ruth Morgan, Viktor Olsson, Alexandra Berivoe, Joseph Hefner, and Martin Arvidsson. 2022. “Using Eye-Tracking Technology to Quantify the Effect of Experience and Education on Forensic Anthropological Analyses.” Forensic Anthropology. https://doi.org/10.5744/fa.2022.0001.
Cornelison, Jered B., Carolyn V. Isaac, Clara J. Devota, Joseph Billian, Theodore T. Brown, Joyce L. deJong, Elizabeth A. Douglas, Amanda O. Fisher-Hubbard, Wendy L. Lackey-Cornelison, Joseph A. Prahlow et al. 2022. “A Comparison of Three Decalcification Agents for Assessments of Cranial Fracture Histomorphology.” Journal of Forensic Sciences 67, no. 3: 1157-1166. https://doi.org/10.1111/1556-4029.14990.
Fujita, Masako, Katherine Wander, Nerli Paredes Ruvalcaba, and Amelia Ngozi Odo. 2022. “Human Milk Lactoferrin Variation in relation to Maternal Inflammation and Iron Deficiency in Northern Kenya.” American Journal of Human Biology. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajhb.23812.
Gajasinghe, Kasun, and Priyanka Jayakodi. 2022. “Examining Relationships between Religious and Linguistic Nationalism in a Recent Controversy Surrounding the Sri Lankan National Anthem.” English Teaching: Practice & Critique 21, no. 3: 307-319. https://doi.org/10.1108/ETPC-10-2021-0141.
Isaac, Carolyn V., Jered B. Cornelison, Clara J. Devota, Brandy L. Shattuck, and Rudolph J. Castellani. 2022. “An Unusual Blunt Force Trauma Pattern and Mechanism to the Cranial Vault: Investigation of an Atypical Infant Homicide.” Journal of Forensic Sciences 68 (1): 315–26. https://doi:10.1111/1556-4029.15168.
Isaac, Carolyn V., Jered B. Cornelison, Clara J. Devota, Kristi Bailey, and Jonathan Langworthy. 2022. “A Method for the Development of Cranial Fracture Histology Slides.” Journal of Forensic Sciences 67 (5): 2040–47. https://doi:10.1111/1556-4029.15093.
Isaac, Carolyn V., Jered B. Cornelison, Joseph A. Prahlow, Clara J. Devota, and Erica R. Christensen. 2022. “The Repository of Antemortem Injury Response (REPAIR): An Online Database for Skeletal Injuries of Known Ages.” International Journal of Legal Medicine 136 (4): 1189–96. https://doi:10.1007/s00414-021-02756-z
Radonic, Lucero, Cara Jacob, Rowenn Kalman, and E. Yvonne Lewis. 2022. “Questionable Quality: Using Photovoice to Document Women’s Experiences of Water Insecurity in Flint, USA.” Case Studies in the Environment 6, no. 1: 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1525/cse.2022.1706476.
Wollmann, Jessica S., Aubree S. Marshall, McKenzie Schrank, and Laura Tobias Gruss. 2022. “Tibial Torsion and Pressures in the Feet during Walking: Implications for Patterns of Metatarsal Robusticity.” American Journal of Biological Anthropology, 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.24641.
Zhu, David C., Chih‐Ying Gwo, An‐Wen Deng, Norman Scheel, Mari A. Dowling, and Rong Zhang. 2022. “Hippocampus Shape Characterization with 3D Zernike Transformation in Clinical Alzheimer’s Disease Progression.” Human Brain Mapping, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.26130.
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Anthropology professor and former chair Dr. Jodie O’Gorman receives distinguished award and reflects on career
By Katie Nicpon
Dr. Jan Brashler (left), MAC President and MSU alumna, presents Dr. Jodie O’Gorman (right) with the Distinguished Career Award at the annual Midwest Archaeological Conference. During the annual Midwest Archaeological Conference (MAC), Dr. Jodie O’Gorman, MSU Department of Anthropology professor, received the Distinguished Career Award that recognizes archaeologists who have demonstrated excellence and contributed significantly and regularly to the advancement of Midwestern archaeology.
“I”m honored to receive the Distinguished Career Award and I’m very grateful to those who took the time to nominate me and write in support of the nomination,” Dr. O’Gorman said.
The award has deep meaning for O’Gorman because the MAC has been a valuable part of her professional life since graduate school.
“I gave my first professional paper at a MAC meeting decades ago, and participating in the organization has taught me a lot over the years about professionalism and advocacy – and of course the archaeology of the midcontinent. I’ve served as a board member, secretary, and president of the organization, and helped host two of its annual meetings in East Lansing.”
Additionally, receiving the award in La Crosse, Wisconsin held special meaning for Dr. O’Gorman because her roots are nearby on the Minnesota side of the Mississippi Valley, and she spent summers in La Crosse from 1987-1990 working for the Wisconsin State Historical Society on a complex of village sites outside the city. Her dissertation research emerged from that project.
As part of the MAC conference, Drs. Lynne Goldstein (MSU Professor Emerita of Anthropology) and Jenn Bengtson (Associate Professor, Southeast Missouri State University) put together a symposium in her honor titled, “Migration, Gender, Foodways, and Collections in the Midwestern U.S.: Various Pathways in Honor of Jodie O’Gorman.” The symposium featured studies that explored a few of Jodie O’Gorman’s major research interests. A number of her colleagues and former students wanted to honor Jodie and highlight her significant impact on archaeology in the Midwestern U.S.
Dr. O’Gorman’s research interests have focused on Native American village life in the midcontinent of North America from about AD 1000 to 1700s. Archaeologists identify many different cultural traditions in the midcontinent during this period and she has been interested in the relationships of different groups within and between communities.
“Many people were living in substantial villages during this time and some of the villages and towns can be described as multi-ethnic,” she said. “I’m interested in how people negotiated their interactions and how ideas and practices both created and maintained relationships between people and between people and their landscape. Throughout my career, I’ve been particularly interested in how the role of women and their agency in foodways play into these interactions.”
Dr. O’Gorman plans to retire September 1, 2023, and is beginning to reflect on her career.
“I’m very proud of the Morton Village research project I’ve been co-directing for almost 15 years now,” she reminisced. “Our field and lab work at the site has been the focus or contributed to eight dissertations and many publications have come from the research. My students, the co-PI, collaborators, and myself have come to interpret the multi-ethnic site in new ways and colleagues are realizing how important this example is to how we understand ancient patterns of Native American cultural interactions across the broader region.”
She has also spent time reflecting on the students she has taught in field schools and other archaeology courses.
“I enjoyed my time with them very much and many individuals stand out – mostly for positive reasons! I am proud of them all whether they pursued careers in archaeology or simply moved on having learned more about archaeology. I’m especially thankful for having the opportunity to work with Native American students and colleagues at MSU; they’ve helped me understand more fully the importance of different perspectives and made me a better archaeologist.”
Upon her retirement, Dr. O’Gorman plans to explore a variety of research and other interests that fell by the wayside during the past forty years.
“But my top goal is to spend more time with my family, especially my grandchildren,” she said. “And my partner, and enjoy our cabin in the woods, tend my gardens, fish more, read more, paint more, write different things – the list goes on.”
Dr. O’Gorman joined the MSU Department of Anthropology in 2000 and served as the department chair for nine years.
“We’re so grateful to Jodie for her dedication to our students, our colleagues, our community partners and the field,” Todd Fenton, Ph.D., said, professor and current department chair. “We especially appreciate Jodie’s service as our chair for nine years. We wish her so much joy and time with loved ones during her retirement.”
To learn more about Dr. O’Gorman, visit anthropology.msu.edu.
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Associate Professor Ethan Watrall Elected as a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries
The Department of Anthropology is pleased to announce that Associate Professor Dr. Ethan Watrall has been named a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.
Founded in 1707 and granted a royal charter in 1751, the Society of Antiquaries is based in London and charged with furthering the study and preservation of heritage and archaeology in Britain and around the world.
The Society’s 3000 elected members include some of the most prominent scholars and professionals in heritage and archaeology, national museum directors, curators, directors of heritage preservation trusts and non-profits, and members of the UK parliament.
Fellows are nominated internally and elected by existing members of the Society in recognition of their significant achievement in the fields of heritage and archaeology and are entitled to use the initials FSA after their names.
Dr. Watrall was nominated and elected in recognition of his work in publicly engaged digital heritage, digital preservation in heritage and archaeology, and digital museum collections.
Dr. Watrall is the first and only Fellow elected from Michigan State University.
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Dr. Ampson Hagan joins the Department of Anthropology as College of Social Science Dean’s Research Associate
The MSU Department of Anthropology welcomes Dr. Ampson Hagan as their new College of Social Science Dean’s Research Associate. Dr. Hagan earned his PhD in anthropology from University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and joined MSU in fall semester 2022.
“I applied to the College of Social Science Dean’s Research Associate Program at MSU because it looked like it was one of a kind,” he said. “The dedication to supporting and nurturing scholars from diverse backgrounds caught my eye, and the program’s commitment to doing the work of putting scholars in positions to succeed, with institutional resources, intrigued me.”
Dr. Hagan’s research interests surround humanitarianism and rescue, broadly focusing on how Black African migrants crossing the Sahara Desert encounter and navigate the humanitarian and policing nexus that seeks to intercept them.
He grew up watching cartoons where superheroes saved others, and then he worked in large NGOs in which people engaged in heroic acts of humanitarianism and rescue. In 2015, during his PhD research at UNC, he often saw news reports of African migrants getting stranded and shipwrecked in the Mediterranean.
“I began to wonder about the paths they took to reach the sea, and I began to see more reports of migrants stuck in the Sahara. After reading about humanitarianism in the Sahara and other regions of Niger and Algeria, I decided to go and see what I could learn about the lives of migrants in those countries.”
Over the course of 12 months of ethnographic research with unauthorized migrants and inside a migrant camp in Niger, this research is the body of his dissertation, Deserving Humans in the Desert: How Black trans-Saharan Migrants Experience the Logics of Liberal Humanism via Humanitarian Care in Transit.
He has ambivalences towards the field of humanitarianism, as well as the practice of rescue.
“The inherent politics of both are complex and involve contradictions to their stated goals,” he said. “Articulating those politics and contradictions is something I think is incredibly important. That would allow stakeholders, organizations, and governments to speak more openly and think more critically about how concepts of humanity, and understandings of who is considered human, are at stake in humanitarian rescue operations and structures.”
He thinks that the rescue as a concept needs to be critically analyzed as a tool that reflects who is worthy of being saved and who is not and that these issues are important for anthropology and for society to consider.
“I hope that others continue to question the concepts of rescue and humanitarianism on their ‘human’ grounds. A humanitarianism that fails to influence or even attempt to improve the abject and dangerous conditions that humans face, is a failure to intervene in crisis. What does that say about humanitarianism? About rescue? I want this research and its fundamental questions to exist in conversations outside of my narrow slice of academic discourse.”
In spring, he will teach ANP 330 Race, Ethnicity and Nation, and this semester, he’s focusing on writing.
“As a very new member of the department, my most meaningful experiences have been all the support from my colleagues, and all the time I have had to write!” he said.
Dr. Hagan joins the department of Anthropology as a Dean’s Research Associate, a program established in 2018 aimed at promoting an inclusive scholarly environment in which outstanding scholars in the social sciences support the advancement of diversity, equity and inclusion in the academy.
“We’re delighted that Dr. Hagan has joined our faculty and we are excited about the important perspectives and dynamic research he brings to our department,” Dr. Todd Fenton said, chair of the department.
The Dean’s Research Associates have a minimal teaching load, will be mentored and supported, and will participate in a Dean’s Research Associate Development Institute with the goal of possibly transitioning them into tenure-system positions at MSU.
“Offering more than just words, the program has put in place institutional resources that will promote the development of scholars of color, and I am excited for the opportunity to grow as a researcher and a future faculty member at MSU,” Dr. Hagan said.
In addition to his research, writing and teaching, Dr. Hagan enjoys learning new skills.
“I want to learn how to skate. I have plenty of pursuits and skills that I want to attain in the near future and learning to in-line and roller skate are important skills to learn,” he said. “Two more things: I’d like to volunteer on a farm, and I want to learn how to drive a car with a manual transmission.”
To learn more about Dr. Hagan, visit https://anthropology.msu.edu/author/haganam1/.
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MSU Department of Anthropology holds Human Remains Excavation Course for Michigan State Police
By Katie Nicpon
Caption: The MSU Forensic Anthropology Lab facilitated a training session in Lansing for members of the Michigan State Police force. The training involved how to properly excavate and handle remains. The skeletons used for the training were made of plastic. Photo credit: Jacqueline Hawthorne, MSU College of Social Science photographer.
In September, the MSU Department of Anthropology offered their four-day, Human Remains Excavation Course for Michigan State Police officers and laboratory personnel.
“This training is important for us to expand our skillset and provide the best and highest quality response for the community,” Christina Rasmussen said. She works for the Michigan State Police in the Lansing Forensic Lab and was one of 17 participants in the training.
This training provides an overview of how forensic anthropology can contribute to investigating deaths, and the appropriate methods investigators should follow when they are searching for and recovering actual human remains (although the skeletons used for training are made of plastic).
“This training is important, as service to the community is a pillar of our practice,” Dr. Carolyn Isaac said. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology in the College of Social Science, and the director of the MSU Forensic Anthropology Laboratory (MSUFAL). She collaborated with Anthropology Associate Professor Joe Hefner, PhD., on the training, in addition to receiving help from graduate students including Rhian Dunn, Micayla Spiros, Clara Devota, and Holly Long.
“We often partner with law enforcement to aid in the search and recovery of human remains and it is essential that we all understand the appropriate techniques to ensure all of the skeletal remains and evidence at the scene are collected. We also want to create relationships with our law enforcement colleagues so they know they can call us to assist in such recoveries.”
The training includes a combination of lectures and hands-on experience. Lectures feature topics such as how to assess sex, age, ancestry, and stature from skeletal remains; identifications using comparative radiography, skeletal trauma analysis; and forensic archaeology.
The department also provides a hands-on osteology (bone) laboratory so participants can try to identify the various features of the biological profile in the skeletal remains.
One afternoon is dedicated to forensic entomology (how the study of insects can contribute to the death investigation) and a field demonstration of decomposition and the collection of insects of interest. Ryan Kimbirauskas, PhD, a board-certified forensic entomologist and MSU faculty in the Center for Integrative Studies in General Science hosted this part of the training.
“On the third day (excavation day) teams search for, systematically excavate, recover, and document simulated clandestine burials (plastic skeletons that we buried back in May),” Dr. Isaac said. “From this exercise, they prepare presentations on their excavations and present them on the last day.”
Caption: The MSU Forensic Anthropology Lab facilitated a training session in Lansing for members of the Michigan State Police force. The training involved how to properly excavate and handle remains. The skeletons used for the training were made of plastic. Photo credit: Jacqueline Hawthorne, MSU College of Social Science photographer.
On excavation day, participants are divided into a number of teams to perform line searches and probing to detect where the simulated clandestine burials are located. Once the burial locations have been determined, they begin the systematic excavation, ensuring thorough mapping and photography of the process are completed.
“The goal is to expose the skeleton to understand the position of the remains and any associated evidence when they were placed into the ground,” Dr. Isaac explained. “During this process they learn how to detect clandestine graves or soil disturbances, utilize soil probes to determine the outline of the burial, set up a grid over the burial for mapping, carefully remove soil from above the remains to ensure they are not disturbed, screen soil to find any small portions of bones or evidence, pedestal the bones (i.e. removing enough soil to expose the bones but not too much where they will fall out of place), and how to take coordinates of the skeletal remains to produce a map for documentation purposes.”
For Rasmussen, one key takeaway was the need to approach each scene differently but collaboratively.
“I learned the importance of being creative and innovative since each scene is different,” she said. “Working together as a team is the only way to effectively process a scene.”
The Human Remains Excavation course has a rich and long history that spans several decades. The training course was established by Dr. Norm Sauer, founder of the MSU Forensic Anthropology Laboratory, back in the 1990s, and it continued when Dr. Todd Fenton took over the directorship of the lab in 2012.
“The MSUFAL relationship with the MSP has been around for a long time and represents years of working together on complex forensic recoveries, death investigations ranging from suspicious deaths to multiple homicides, and everything in between,” Dr. Hefner said. “We are fortunate to have such a strong bond with the state law enforcement, and these courses provide us an opportunity to give back to the community outside of our normal academic duties.” To learn more about the MSU Forensic Anthropology Lab, visit anthropology.msu.edu.
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Anthropology Grad Student Spotlight: Kelsey Merreck Wagner – Human-environment relationships and art as activism
By Katie Nicpon
Passionate about the intersection of people, animals, environment and activism, Kelsey Merreck Wagner is a Ph.D. candidate in the MSU Anthropology program and is also an artist. Since the pandemic, she has been weaving community trash into tapestries and preparing for her dissertation research trip to Thailand in October.
MSU Anthropology PhD candidate and local artist Kelsey Merreck Wagner stands with her tapestry she wove using plastic. For more of her art, visit her website. Photo credit: Kelsey Merreck Wagner.
“I was really drawn to the idea that weavings are inherently based in place because people generally use local fibers, whether it’s from sheep or local plant fibers, and the dyes from their materials come from their local ecosystems,” she said. “I really kind of wanted to do a satirical nod to that by thinking: Okay, what is my place-based weaving as a white woman in America? Plastic. Plastic. Plastic is my local resource that I have so much of. Trash is part of our environment and so plastic really can’t be separated from that. Because once it’s made, once it’s consumed and thrown away, it’s always going to be there. I started weaving with these as an experiment and realized I really loved the textures and patterns.”
Once she began collecting trash from others, she realized how trash displays intersectional identities in a person or a community such as gender, age, race and class, almost like a portrait.
“I also see my art as a call out to these different brands and corporations as kind of an eye opener of how much plastic adds up over time,” she said.
Her work will be showcased in the upcoming MSU Museum Science Gallery 1.5 ° Celsius exhibition which begins on September 6, 2022, and will last through February 2023. The exhibition will include contributions of more than one dozen national and international artists, scientists, and researchers to help the public explore the global climate crisis.
“They also asked me to do a weaving workshop at the STEM building,” Wagner said. “I’m going to be bringing a huge, basic, wooden tapestry loom that I’ll build for this one project. I’ll be bringing in plastic and then workshop participants are also encouraged to bring in any kind of trash that they want to weave with. We’re going to all work together to do a collaborative community weaving and see what we can make. We will be able to think of it as a portrait of the community or of the participants thinking about all the different trash that we use.”
Wagner will lead a weaving workshop on September 18 at the MSU Museum open to everyone in the community. Register at museum.msu.edu. Photo credit: MSU Museum.
Wagner’s undergrad training is in studio art and art history, and she found an interdisciplinary masters’ anthropology program where she was able to develop her art in relation to sustainability and the environment.
“I was passionate about and wanted to get more involved with environmentalism, but I never saw myself as a natural scientist,” she said. “But during my master’s, I started going to work at this elephant organization in Thailand, and it made me realize for the first time that conservation is really about people, and it’s about communities.”
Once she graduated from her master’s program, she worked for a year in Cambodia for an environmental organization as their exhibitions coordinator for their natural history museum. She was applying to MSU at the time and getting in touch with Dr. Beth Drexler, who is now her current graduate advisor.
“She was excited about the idea of blending visual anthropology and interdisciplinary research, and environmental activism, which is so exciting, because it was important to me to find an advisor and a program that values interdisciplinary work and activism,” she said. “That’s really why I ended up at MSU in this program, because I felt like there’s so many people that were studying different things and blending different bodies of knowledge, especially in a four field program. And that felt like the right fit for me. It all fell into place that I would be able to use my background in arts, my love of elephants and the environment. And then just also being really interested in how people relate to environments.”
Wagner is in her fourth year of her MSU Anthropology PhD program. In October, she will travel to Thailand to start her dissertation research. Her work focuses on human-environment and human-animal relationships, and how people have long-standing traditions of interacting with the environment, interacting with animals in the ecosystems in ways that are part of their culture. In Thailand, she is specifically interested in researching human-elephant relationships.
“I have been obsessed with elephants since I was a little girl, so it’s been a life-long passion of mine,” Wagner smiled. “In Thailand, elephants are so common in material culture and pop culture. They’re the national cultural symbol, and everywhere you go, there are sculptures of elephants outside buildings, in restaurants, t-shirts, and tourism goods – you see elephants everywhere. I’m also an artist, so I like seeing how elephants are portrayed and what a particular culture or community within that culture thinks about these animals and how they treat them.”
There’s a conservation component of her research where she’ll be continuing to work with the elephant organization Elephant Nature Park in Chiang Mai that she’s been working with since her master’s.
“It’s a giant elephant sanctuary where they have over 100 rescued elephants that have been rescued from circuses, street begging, logging – many unethical, unfair labor situations. The sanctuary is run by a local Thai woman who only hires local Thai and nearby ethnic groups to work at this organization caring for the elephants. Then, tourists come in and pay to clean up after the elephants and feed them. It’s a huge organization that does a lot for local communities, including funding and building some local schools.”
Wagner working with Elephant Nature Park in Chiang Mai, Thailand, where she will complete her dissertation research. Photo credit: Kelsey Merreck Wagner
Through the organization, Wagner hopes to do a community engagement art project with the youth. While she envisions giant murals or a large art installation, she’s also leaving it open-ended because she wants the youth to express their ideas for the project.
“I’m trying to really just make those connections between activism and expression, both personal expression and community expression by bringing in the idea of talking about the environment through art. Anthropologists are really interested in applied and activist anthropology, and pondering how our research can contribute to issues as broad as climate change and human rights. And so for me, that’s why it’s really important to be working on these different art projects and activism projects with community members, and especially youth, because I see it as my way to be able to like give back in this very specific art and activism skill set that I’ve been developing for more than 10 years now.”
View Wagner’s work and join in the discussion about climate change at the MSU Museum Science Gallery 1.5 ° Celsius exhibition: https://museum.msu.edu/?exhibition=1-5-celsius. The weaving workshop is on the MSU campus from 1:00-2:00 on Sunday, September 18. You can register here.
To learn more about the MSU Department of Anthropology, visit anthropology.msu.edu.
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MSU Anthropology professor and undergraduate participate in Smithsonian global oyster study
Small “pit feature” or accumulation of oyster, other shellfish, animal bone and artifacts in Rhode Island dated to 100-500 years ago. Sites like this show the full range of sites used in the study, with this representing the smaller end of accumulation of oysters. Photo courtesy of Kevin McBride.Dr. Sanchez, MSU Department of Anthropology assistant professor, and his colleague Dr. Michael Grone, California Department of Parks and Recreation, contributed to the global study of Indigenous oyster fisheries, which synthesized over a century of archaeological findings from the San Francisco Bay Area. The synthesis of these data was supported by MSU Anthropology major Emily Westfall.
“I participated in the research to contribute to reimagining Indigenous-environmental relationships, specifically Indigenous fisheries, within archaeological, biological, and ecological literature,” Dr. Sanchez said. “So often, Indigenous relationships with culturally important species, such as oysters, are often minimized. I believe it is critical to center long-term Indigenous relationships with species, ecosystems, and landscapes within the academy and beyond.”
Their research was a part of a global study co-led by Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History anthropologist Torben Rick and Temple University anthropologist Leslie Reeder-Myers. The study, published May 3 in Nature Communications, shows that oyster fisheries were hugely productive and sustainably managed on a massive scale over hundreds and even thousands of years of intensive harvest.
Drs. Sanchez and Grone summarized the findings from over 30 San Francisco Bay Area archaeological sites. The study includes the earliest known archaeological site within the San Francisco Bay Area that provides evidence of human-oyster relationships that span the last 6,000 years, known as the West Berkeley (CA-ALA-307) site. Sanchez and Grone recently reanalyzed the West Berkeley site with several colleagues from the University of California, Berkeley, including Professor Kent Lightfoot, with the support of the National Science Foundation.
Westfall joined the project at the beginning of the 2020-2021 school year and conducted literature searches of all of the archaeological sites of interest to find historical data regarding the presence of oyster use by humans to support current data.
“The research was important to me because even though I could not practice the hands-on methods due to the pandemic, it allowed me to gain insight into the other side of archaeology: the side involving writing articles and the background research,” Westfall said. “It was an invaluable experience as an anthropology major to be able to experience the whole process of archaeology research during my three semesters working with Dr. Sanchez.”
