Department of Anthropology

  • Campus Archaeology Program (CAP)

    CAP at MSU's Science Fest 2019
    CAP at MSU’s Science Fest 2019 (behind table right to left: Mari Isa, Dr. Stacey Camp, Jack Biggs, and Jeff Burnett)

    The Michigan State University Campus Archaeology Program (CAP) provides a wide array of opportunities for both undergraduate and graduate students. Whether you are looking to get your hands dirty digging in the dirt or you want to help share some spooky archaeologically-inspired stories during CAP’s annual Apparitions and Archaeology event in October, CAP provides unique and innovative ways for both anthropology and non-anthropology students to learn about the past. CAP provides hands-on training and real-world experience in archaeological excavation, historical research, public outreach, and artifact identification and analysis. 

    Every other summer CAP runs an archaeological field school where students can obtain credit for helping to excavate and study a piece of MSU’s history. This past summer 15 field school students excavated an area of land next to Holmes Hall that once housed a homestead that dates to the late 1800s and early 1900s. The property was purchased by the Michigan State Board of Agriculture in 1953. Some of the students involved on this project are working as interns for the CAP lab. There, they are working to catalog and analyze artifacts from the field project as well as collaborating on research presentations and posters to share with our campus community.

    If you’d like an opportunity to be involved with CAP, contact Dr. Stacey Camp, Director of the MSU Campus Archaeology Program. Her email is campstac@msu.edu.

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  • Featured Graduate Student, Autumn Painter

    Autumn Painter, a graduate student here in the Department of Anthropology, specializing in archaeology was provided the opportunity to travel with Dr. Marcy O’Neil, an anthropology alumna and grant support staff and former instructor in the department, to Benin, West Africa during the summer of 2018. In collaboration with the Department of Anthropology and the African Studies Center, both here at MSU, Ms. Painter and Dr. O’Neil celebrated the launch of the second volume of a project called Books That Bind at the US Embassy in Cotonou. Autumn became a part of this project during her assistantship in Lab for Education and Advancement in Digital Research (LEADR), and continued to be involved with it following her assistantship.

    Books That Bind was created by Three Sisters and the Three Sisters Education Fund (TSEF), who provide tutoring scholarships to underserved students in Benin. This project creates bi-lingual storybooks. The first volume of books was created by MSU undergraduate students in Dr. O’Neil’s class in Spring 2017. In addition to the launch at the US Embassy, they also worked on getting the second volume of books printed and signed by the storytellers, and participants in the book making process, and did a launch at one of the communities with which Three Sisters works. The experience was something that Ms. Painter never thought she would have the opportunity to participate in and in doing so, learned much from Dr. O’Neil and the anthropologists (& their family and friends) in Benin. Ms. Painter is thankful that the Department of Anthropology, and her mentors within the department (Dr. O’Gorman, Dr. Goldstein, Dr. Camp, and Dr. Watrall) have always encouraged and supported her ideas and goals and provided her with the support, advice, and the opportunities to reach them.

    Ms. Painter’s general research interests lay in foodways and social interactions in prehistory. Her proposed dissertation research will focus on these concepts at a Mississippian and Oneota village site, the Morton Village, located in west-central Illinois during a known time of violence. Using this site, she hopes to gain a better understanding of the relationship between the two groups that occupied this site at the same time through the analysis of the faunal remains (i.e. food sharing and social interaction).

    Autumn first became interested in archaeology and anthropology in elementary school when she attended the Hiawatha National Forest’s Youth Archaeology Workshop on Grand Island (run by Jon Franzen, Jim Skibo [Illinois State University], and Eric Drake [MSU Anthropology Alumnus]). She ended up applying and attending this 2-day workshop every summer from 5th grade through her senior year of high school and continued to volunteer for the Hiawatha National Forest whenever the opportunity arose.

    This led her to pursue her undergraduate studies here at MSU, where she majored in Anthropology before attending Illinois State University for her Masters degree. Here she found a passion for faunal analysis and using a comparative skeletal collection to identify animal bone fragments form archaeological sites. Her love for her native state led her back to MSU for her graduate studies, where she is currently the Campus Archaeologist. This position allows her to continually interact with the public and participate in archaeological outreach events. Talking and interacting with the general public about archaeology is always a lot of fun for her and she finds that it is great to hear their questions and the different ways they think about our research and the artifacts we uncover.

    Autumn’s long term career goals are to either be a professor teaching classes and conducting her own research in collaboration with the park service/forest service, or working for a museum/research collection center. She feels that MSU has and is preparing her by giving her the many opportunities to learn and experience a multitude of interactions that have shaped her into an anthropologist. These experiences include her assistantships within the department as a teaching assistant, a research assistant in the Lab for Education and Advancement in Digital Research (LEADR), a research assistant as the Campus Archaeologist, the Cultural Heritage Informatics Fellowship, and the Campus Archaeology Program Fellowship.

    Aside from her dissertation research, Autumn has many upcoming projects and articles in the works. She is co-author on an article in review in for the journal Ethnoarchaeology entitled “Acorn Processing and Pottery Use in the Upper Great Lakes: An Experimental Comparison of Stone Boiling and Ceramic Technology” with Kelsey E. Hanson, Paula L. Bryant, Autumn M. Painter, and James M. Skibo. She is working on an oral history project with Alice Lynn McMichael (LEADR) on the Campus Archaeology Program to be launched in the spring of 2019. Also be sure the take a look at her latest website about an early food project on MSU’s campus: Capturing Campus Cuisine.

    To read the rest of this newsletter, click here.

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  • Dr. Stacey Camp receives S3 Grant

    Dr. Stacey Camp receives S3 Grant

    S3 campus archaeology digDr. Stacey Camp, Dr. Lynne Goldstein (Anthropology), and Dr. Leigh Graves Wolf (College of Education) with the Archaeology STEM Camp Pilot Project will use a grant from Science and Society at State (S3)  to run a two-day archaeology camp this June for 15 International Baccalaureate (IB) high school students on Michigan State University’s campus. Founded in 1968, the International Baccalaureate is a non-profit educational foundation that offers internationally respected curricula and programming. IB programs are growing in popularity, representing 90,000 students worldwide. All IB students are required to conduct research for and complete ad 4,000 word “extended essay.” This pilot project will provide a unique hands-on experiential opportunity for IB students to learn about science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) and archaeology. It will also allow students to gather data for their extended essay requirement.

    Dr. Stacey Camp, Dr. Lynne Goldstein, and Dr. Leigh Wolf (College of Education) initiated their collaboration in October of 2017 after Dr. Goldstein was contacted by a local school district with requests to develop a targeted archaeology outreach program. Additionally, university administration expressed support for the development of an ongoing program to connect the MSU Campus Archaeology Program (CAP) to secondary school students. CAP had worked with schools in the past to present workshops and demonstrations, but they wanted to develop an ongoing long-term program to provide both a participatory experience for high school students and an interdisciplinary research opportunity for the project team members.

    While archaeology is not always considered a STEM discipline, archaeologists use principles and approaches from geometry, geography, geology, various physical sciences, botany, and zoology to study the past. Archaeologists also study landscapes, use engineering equipment and GIS, do various kinds of digital work, and we identify artifacts, plant and animal remains, and study soils.

    Team Leader
    Stacey L. Camp, Department of Anthropology, College of Social Science

    Team Members
    Leigh Graves Wolf, College of Education

    Lynne Goldstein, Department of Anthropology, College of Social Science

    Science and Society at State (S3), is an interdisciplinary research institution offering financial support for scholarship across disciplines at Michigan State University. Their mission is to promote interdisciplinary research and education that utilizes methods, approaches, and scholarship from STEM, the health sciences, and science studies (studies of science using methods and scholarship from the humanities and/or social sciences).

     

    Click here to read the Spring 2018 newsletter.

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  • Featured Faculty: Dr. Stacey Camp

    Featured Faculty: Dr. Stacey Camp

    Dr Stacey CampThe Department of Anthropology is pleased to introduce our new Associate Professor in archaeology and Campus Archaeology Program (CAP) Director, Dr. Stacey Camp. Dr. Camp’s research centers around an interest in how social inequality is manifested and expressed through material culture and the built environment. More specifically, she employs critical race theory to understand how marginalized groups respond to social isolation and discrimination through their consumption patterns. In her first book, The Archaeology of Citizenship, she examined how different marginalized groups, especially migrants, in the United States made claims to nationality and citizenship via material culture. Through this work, she hopes to diversify the stories we tell about the Western U.S., and bring to light elements of its neglected or forgotten past.

    In Idaho, Dr. Camp directed a public archaeological repository, where she began to admire CAP’s creative and unique approach to public outreach. Projects such as CAP’s “MSU dinner”, performed in partnership with Campus Culinary Services and MSU Bakers as well as CAP’s partnership with the MSU Paranormal Society to offer historic haunted tours are just some of distinctive styles of public engagement she admired from afar. Dr. Camp appreciates how CAP facilitates interdisciplinary collaborations between archaeologists and the campus community at large while also demonstrating the continued relevance of archaeology to the modern world. In her opinion, one of the most important features about the Campus Archaeology program is that it gives students who can’t attend field schools outside of the state or abroad an opportunity to gain vital archaeological field school experience at a minimal cost and provides students a very unique opportunity to connect with the history literally underneath their feet.

    Her love for historical archaeology began after attending a field school in Ireland as an undergraduate with Dr. Charles Orser, Jr. of Illinois State University. Orser emphasized doing archaeology for the public good, which is what attracted her to historical archaeology. Camp ended up returning to Ireland to study the representation of the past and archaeological data at government-run museums and heritage sites in 2001, allowing her passions for ethnography, cultural anthropology, and archaeology to merge.

    Growing up in Southern California, Dr. Camp loved studying geology and identifying rocks, an interest that eventually morphed into a love of artifacts and history. Having the opportunity to volunteer at a museum in high school made her decision to pursue Anthropology an easy one. When she’s not at work, she loves hiking, reading and reviewing fiction, and spending time with her two children, husband, and their dog. Before MSU, Dr. Camp was at a small land grant institution in rural Idaho for 9 years so there has been a bit of a welcome adjustment being back around an urban center. She and her family are excited to be at a university with so many resources and events taking place and to be near water and ice rinks again.

    Dr. Camp says that the best part of her job is she gets paid to continually learn new information as well as to adapt to the changing needs of students in the classroom. She has taught thirteen different courses over the last 10 years as a professor, and learned much about human behavior, the past, and different cultures through her various course preps. She enjoys the challenge of learning and integrating new technologies and pedagogies into her classes to keep content fresh and relevant to today’s students.

    Dr Camp excavating at kooskia interment camp
    Dr. Camp excavating at Kooskia Internment Camp

    Dr. Stacey Camp’s current research project involves archaeological and archival research on a World War II internment camp in Idaho, the Kooskia Internment Camp, where first generation Japanese migrants were imprisoned as enemy aliens by the United States government. This project uses material culture to examine how these Japanese migrants coped with incarceration. After two field seasons at the Kooskia Internment Camp, she is working on cataloging and analyzing her data, and has hopes to finish the cataloging process this year, which will allow her to publish her findings. The raw (and published) data can be found on www.internmentarchaeology.org.

    Currently, she is writing an article on race and public health in World War II internment camps and has a commentary on an edited volume of the journal Historical Archaeology concerning World War II internment coming out next year. Also coming out in the next year is a book chapter on databases in historical archaeology.

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