Calling Cards: Theory and Practice in the Study of Race, Gender, and Culture , edited by Jacqueline Royster and Ann Marie Simpkins, received the 2006 College English Association of Ohio Nancy Dasher Award. Susan Krouse, faculty member in Anthropology, has a chapter in this volume, titled: “Transforming Images: The Scholarship of American Indian Women.”

Robert A. Birmingham and Lynne Goldstein, Aztalan: Mysteries of an Ancient Indian Town, won The Midwest Independent Publishers Association Merit Award for the History category, 2006.

Elizabeth Drexler’s Aceh, Indonesia: Securing the Insecure State (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) has won an award by Association of Third World Studies (ATWS) Cecil B. Currey Book-Length Publications Award for 2007-2008.

Edited by Russell K. Skowronek and Kenneth E. Lewis
(University Press of Florida)

Overview:

“For the first time we have a volume that shows us the story of archaeology at some of our most significant and cherished institutions, America’s colleges and universities.”–Richard C. Waldbauer, National Park Service

“The chapters in this volume demonstrate the integration of teaching, learning, research, and service in the efforts to preserve and interpret heritage for the benefit of all those who identify with the academy.”–Michael S. Nassaney, Western Michigan University

As a discipline, archaeology often provides amazing insights into the past. But it can also illuminate the present, especially when investigations are undertaken to better examine the history of institutions such as colleges and universities.

In Beneath the Ivory Tower, contributors offer a series of case studies to reveal the ways archaeology can offer a more objective view of changes and transformations that have taken place on America’s college campuses. From the tennis courts of William and Mary to the “iconic paths, lawns, and well-ordered brick buildings” of Harvard, this volume will change the ways readers look at their alma maters–and at archaeology. Also included are studies of Michigan State, Notre Dame, South Carolina, Massachusetts, Illinois, North Carolina, Washington & Lee, Santa Clara, California, and Stanford.

Russell K. Skowronek (Ph.D. MSU Anthropology 1989), professor of history and anthropology at the University of Texas-Pan American, is coeditor of X Marks the Spot and coauthor of HMS Fowey Lost and Found. Kenneth E. Lewis, professor of anthropology at Michigan State University, is author of West to Far Michigan: Settling the Lower Peninsula, 1815–1860 and Camden: Historical Archaeology in the South Carolina Backcountry.

Details: 352 pages 6 x 9
Cloth: $59.95
ISBN 13: 978-0-8130-3422-5
ISBN 10: 0-8130-3422-1
Pubdate: 3/21/2010

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Elizabeth F. Drexler
(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008)
Award: Association of Third World Studies (ATWS) Cecil B. Currey Book-Length Publications Award for 2007-2008.

Overview:

“A needed critique of the often-romanticized vision of ‘reconciliation through truth commissions’ for nations caught up in historical cycles of violence.”–Susan Rodgers, College of the Holy Cross

“Elizabeth Drexler’s sensitive treatment of Aceh’s recent history is an invaluable contribution to the debate.”–Goenawan Mohamad, author of Conversations with Difference

In 1998, Indonesia exploded with both euphoria and violence after the fall of its long time authoritarian ruler, Soeharto, and his New Order regime. Hope centered on establishing the rule of law, securing civilian control over the military, and ending corruption. Indonesia under Soeharto was a fundamentally insecure state. Shadowy organizations, masterminds, provocateurs, puppet masters, and other mysterious figures recalled the regime’s inaugural massive anticommunist violence in 1965 and threatened to recreate those traumas in the present. Threats metamorphosed into deadly violence in a seemingly endless spiral. In Aceh province, the cycle spun out of control, and an imagined enemy came to life as armed separatist rebels. Even as state violence and systematic human rights violations were publicly exposed after Soeharto’s fall, a lack of judicial accountability has perpetuated pervasive mistrust that undermines civil society.

Elizabeth F. Drexler analyzes how the Indonesian state has sustained itself amid anxieties and insecurities generated by historical and human rights accounts of earlier episodes of violence. In her examination of the Aceh conflict, Drexler demonstrates the falsity of the reigning assumption of international human rights organizations that the exposure of past violence promotes accountability and reconciliation rather than the repetition of abuses. She stresses that failed human rights interventions can be more dangerous than unexamined past conflicts, since the international stage amplifies grievances and provides access for combatants to resources from outside the region. Violent conflict itself, as well as historical narratives of past violence, become critical economic and political capital, deepening the problem. The book concludes with a consideration of the improved prospects for peace in Aceh following the devastating 2004 tsunami.

Details: 296 pages 6 x 9
Cloth: $59.95
ISBN: 978-0-8122-4057-3
Pubdate: The Ethnography of Political Violence Jan 2008

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Edited by: Alec Campbell, Larry Robbins and Michael Taylor
(Michigan State University Press)

Overview:

Tsodilo Hills is a richly illustrated account one of the world’s oldest and most beautiful historical sites: For 100,000 years, inhabitants of Botswana’s Tsodilo Hills region left behind a record of their gathering wild foods, hunting, fishing, mining, rock painting, cattle herding, and metalworking, as well as of their participation in a coast-to-coast trade network. During the past 30 years, archaeologists, paleontologists, historians, and anthropologists have worked at Tsodilo. Here is the Tsodilo story, the Hills’ revelations brought together in one volume, beautifully illuminated by more than 150 color plates and maps. For scientists, this work brings together decades of research at a site in the Kalahari that was virtually unknown until the late 1970s. Tsodilo Hills also offers a fascinating glimpse into the history of the Kalahari Desert to the general reader, as well as an unsurpassed guide to an extraordinary world to the desert’s many tourists.

Reviews:

“Tsodilo Hills is a wonderfully researched and richly textured description of one of Africa’s most sacred sites. It weaves together multiple lines of evidence — geological, ecological, anthropological, and historical — to construct a chain of interaction that extends for tens of millennia and ties together people and place. It combines perspectives of scientists, students, government administrators, and Tsodilo inhabitants to look from the present both back to the past and into the future.” — John Yellen, research associate, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution

“The abundant photographs range from enthralling and intriguing parts of the Hills, timeless weapons and habitats of area tribes, individuals in traditional and in contemporary dress, rock paintings, and members of scientific teams. Many maps too, regarding different aspects of the Hills (e. g., tourist facilities, excavation sites)….”
— Henry Berry, bookseller and founder of Connecticut Book Auctions

Details: 189 pp., 8.5″ x 11 ”
Paper: $39.95
ISBN: 0-87013-858-8 | 978-0-87013-858-8
Pubdate: January 2010

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Edited by Robert Whallon, William Lovis, and Robert Hitchcock
(University of California Los Angeles-Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press)

Overview:

Information and its Role in Hunter-Gatherer Bands explores the question of how information, broadly conceived, is acquired, stored, circulated, and utilized in small-scale hunter-gatherer societies, or bands. Given the nature of this question, the volume brings together a group of scholars from multiple disciplines, including archaeology, ethnography, linguistics, and evolutionary ecology. Each of these specialties deals with the question of information in different ways and with different sets of data given different primacy. The fundamental goal of the volume is to bridge disciplines and subdisciplines, open discussion, and see if some common ground-either theoretical perspectives, general principles, or methodologies-can be developed upon which to build future research on the role of information in hunter-gatherer bands.

Robert Whallon is professor of anthropology and curator at the Museum of Anthropological Archaeology at University of Michigan, and the founding editor of Journal of Anthropological Archaeology. William A. Lovis (Ph.D. MSU Anthropology 1973), professor of anthropology and curator at the MSU Museum at Michigan State University, is coauthor of Modeling Archaeological Site Burial in Southern Michigan, and editor of An Upper Great Lakes Archaeological Odyssey. Robert K. Hitchcock, professor of geography at Michigan State University, is coauthor of The Ju/’hoan San of Nyae Nyae and Namibian Independence: Development, Democracy, and Indigenous Voices in Southern Africa, and coeditor of Genocide of Indigenous Peoples: A Critical Bibliographic Review.

Details: 256 pages, 6 x 9
Paper: $95.00 Cloth, $65 Paper
ISBN: 978-1-931745-63-5 (cloth) | 978-1-931745-64-2 (paper)
Pubdate: 2/25/2011

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It has been argued that, over the past three decades cities have come to occupy increasingly important roles in a new geography of globalization. Indeed, several scholars have argued that the future is not one of nation-states, but rather one of city-states’ increasingly dominant concentrations of power political, economic and cultural centralized nodes linked together by increasingly rapid flows of people, information and goods and services. This course evaluates this thesis through a series of theoretical writings and case studies and films drawn from the experience of the (post) modern cities of Europe and North America in dialogue with similar writings from the Middle East, North Africa, Latin America and East and South Asia. How do we understand the distinct ways of life that urbanity makes possible? How are cityscapes produced and how do cities and architectures come to take on meanings and carry identities? How might transnational processes contour cityscapes and the identities of the peoples that populate them? How, if at all, does the place of cities in the era of globalization differ from that of cities in earlier colonial and nation-building contexts? Advanced undergraduates and graduate students welcome. Please direct any questions to Professor Hourani at houranin@msu.edu.

MSU’s Department of Anthropology has been ranked #1 in the United States by Public Anthropology’s Public Outreach Assessment Project. Rankings were based on the number and nature of programs focusing on public issues and public outreach that were associated with a department, the degree to which department faculty members engaged in public outreach activities, the nature of the activities engaged in, and the degree to which faculty members were cited in prominent printed media related to their activities. A total of 394 schools were included in the sample. See the project report on the Public Anthropology Web site.

MSU has received an award from CASE: Council for Advancement and Support of Education for its promotion of the Saints’ Rest excavations. We have been told that MSU University Relations will receive its Circle of Excellence Silver Medal Award in the Special Public and Community Relations category for 2006 for the Saints’ Rest Archaeological Project.