Department of Anthropology

  • Alumnae Dr. Jane Wankmiller, Director of FROST

    Dr Jane WankmillerWe are very proud to announce that our recent alumna, Dr. Jane Wankmiller, is the new Director of the Forensic Research Outdoor Station (FROST), and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Northern Michigan University (NMU). FROST, is currently under construction, and will function as an outdoor forensic anthropology research and training facility located in Marquette, MI, near the NMU campus. Her position is part of a new major in anthropology started Fall Semester 2017. Currently, NMU offers concentrations in either cultural anthropology or archaeology, and Dr. Wankmiller will be bringing a third concentration in physical anthropology to the program. She will develop course work over the next few years to serve as the basis for that concentration and as prerequisites for students who wish to work on projects associated with the forensic anthropology lab or the FROST.

    Dr. Wankmiller’s general research interests stemmed from working for the Michigan State Police (MSP) throughout her graduate career in anthropology here at Michigan State University. During that time, she assisted on several cases and was called on for advice in several others. Her work generated specific research questions about estimation of time since death, search and recovery, and positive identification of decomposed remains, but due to the nature of her position within MSP, opportunities to explore those questions never surfaced. While at NMU, Dr. Wankmiller will consult as a forensic anthropologist on medical examiner cases involving decomposed human remains and remains requiring positive identification and skeletal trauma analysis. She will also be developing a workshop program to provide training for law enforcement, educators, and students in the Upper Peninsula. These various research opportunities will allow her to finally examine some of the questions her work with the MSP provided.

    Originally, Dr. Wankmiller was a biology major with an interest in scientific illustration. It was in art school when she enrolled in her first anthropology class. It changed her life and in her own words, “It showed me how connected we all are to one another and how our past has shaped our present.” This is the moment she realized she wanted a career in anthropology. Given her focus was always more biological, the realization that she could study human remains and still be an anthropologist caused her focus to shift and through the discovery of forensic anthropology, an awareness that her knowledge of human skeletal remains could make an immediate impact on real-time cases was realized. She quickly changed her academic trajectory and never turned back. Dr. Jane Wankmiller graduated in 2010 with an MS in Forensic Science (concentration in anthropology) and in 2016 with a Ph.D. in Anthropology (focus on bioarchaeology) from MSU.

    Jane’s current work with NMU builds on her past work with MSU’s own Dr. Norm Sauer as his assistant for forensic anthropology cases.

    Dr Wankmiller in the field
    Dr. Wankmiller working in the field

    This opportunity allowed her to work with the local medical examiner’s office as a death investigator. Both positions factored into her employment with the MSP. Her position at FROST allows her experiences to coalesce in a meaningful way. Her future research interests lie in the improvement of forensic art techniques, and the contributions they can potentially yield regarding effects of taphonomy on forensic anthropology.

    FROST is only the 8th such facility in the United States, with a similar facility in Massachusetts focusing on studying the taphonomy and postmortem condition of non-human subjects. In that regard, the work at FROST is not new, but it stands to contribute to our understanding of human decomposition and taphonomy as it is the farthest north of all such facilities. The extreme northern nature of FROST will enable Dr. Wankmiller to systematically study the effects of a cold climate on those processes. Through the collaborative research between the NMU facility and the other facilities across the country, Jane is hopeful they can serve the law enforcement and medical examiner communities with high quality forensic anthropology services and training that complement those of MSU Forensic Anthropologists.

    As far as the near future goes, the infrastructure for the forensic anthropology research facility and the accompanying laboratory should be in place by the spring of 2018. Dr. Wankmiller anticipates starting some of their law enforcement training workshops and educational programs by the summer of 2018.

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  • Researching Anti-Muslim Sentiment Effects on Women

    Dr Tetreault and her student Ms. Tahir
    Dr. Tetreault and Sara Tahir attending the AAA after their paper presentation, November 2017

    Since the terrorist attacks on 9/11, Muslim Americans have been the focus of increased scrutiny and surveillance. More recently, however, the period since and leading up to the American presidential election shows that: 1) anti-Muslim hate crimes are on the rise, according to FBI data and 2) anti-Muslim public discourse and everyday aggression are coalescing against Muslim women, and especially hijabis or women wearing headscarves. Meanwhile, in France, a similar pattern has emerged in the public targeting of Muslims, and especially hijabi women. As a New York Times article notes, in recent years in France “80 percent of the anti-Muslim acts involving violence and assault were directed at women, most of them veiled.”

    Dr. Tetreault is partnering with Dr. Farha Abbasi (Psychiatry, MSU) and Sara Tahir (2nd year graduate student in Anthropology) to investigate how Muslim women in the United States and France are responding comparatively to an apparent rise in gendered Islamophobia in each context. This research is urgent because women’s responses to anti-Muslim sentiment in a post-election moment constitute ephemeral data. Among other outcomes, they document that women’s self-conscious but fraught choices remain true to oneself and one’s religion, despite becoming a target for racist or Islamophobic violence. They also seek to understand how intersecting identities such as ethnicity/race, immigrant status, age, and other factors play a role in how individual Muslim women are experiencing these shifts in French and U.S. political climates.

    Thus far, their team has collected 40 surveys from Muslim women respondents from a variety of backgrounds, conducted one focus group in Michigan, and presented two conference papers including a co-authored paper with Sara Tahir at the recent American Anthropological Association (AAA) meetings in DC. They are currently writing up the results of this preliminary research to submit for publication. Thus far, they have been fortunate to obtain internal funding for their important work. For the next phase of their research, they plan to submit external grant proposals.

    In spring 2017, Dr. Tetreault was able to hire Sara Tahir as a research assistant thanks to a small grant from the Muslim Studies Program at MSU. Over the summer, thanks to a Strategic Partnership Grant from the Center for Gender in Global Perspective (GenCen), Dr. Tetreault was also able to conduct preliminary research on a two week stay in Paris, France. There, she developed long-term international strategic partnerships with Sciences Politiques, and migration expert Dr. Wihtol De Wenden. Dr. Tetreault and Ms. Tahir were able to partner with a French practitioner and social worker Sanhadja Akrouf, who will help them recruit survey respondents for the French portion of their study, to complement and complete the current research among Muslim women in Michigan.

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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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  • Congratulations Graduates!

    Congratulations to all of our December 2017 graduates. Pictured below, our PhD grads, from left to right: Fayana Richards, Kelly Colas, Dr. O’Gorman, Ryan Klataske, Adam Haviland, Dr. Tetreault, Sharmin Sadequee, Dr. Louie, and Dr. Morgan

    MSU anthropology PhD graduates
    (left to right) Fayana Richards, Kelly Colas, Dr. O’Gorman, Ryan Klataske, Adam Haviland, Dr. Tetreault, Sharmin Sadequee, Dr. Louie, and Dr. Morgan

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  • Message from the Chair: Dr. Jodie O’Gorman

    Dr Jodie O'GormanFall Semester 2017 has come and gone, final grades are in, and MSU is under a blanket of snow. It was a busy and exciting semester. As I reported in the last newsletter, Dr. Fredy Rodriguez-Mejia joined the faculty in August as an undergraduate teaching-focused Assistant Professor. This fall he organized the First Annual Anthropology Undergraduate Symposium and Showcase, and it was a fantastic success. On December 7th, twenty undergraduate students with posters or PowerPoint presentations talked with faculty, graduate students, fellow undergraduates, family and friends about their research. They filled the Erickson Kiva and the excitement in the room about doing anthropology was palpable. We are definitely making this an annual event and I hope it will draw even more students and supporters in the future. Other changes are in the air as well. We are thrilled to welcome Dr. Stacey Camp to the faculty (see story on page 5). Dr. Camp will be taking over the Campus Archaeology Program as Dr. Lynne Goldstein, founder of that program, retires in 2018. We have also started the search process for an environmental archaeologist to round out the archaeology program as Dr. William Lovis retires in August 2018. The department has also hired Dr. Marcy Hessling-O’Neil (2012 PhD), who teaches in anthropology and advises in the Peace and Justice Studies Program, to provide grant support for our faculty and graduate students. Grants are critical for the success of our faculty and graduate students, and there are some exceptional examples of this kind of work in this newsletter. Also important for enriching the research and learning opportunities in the department is the generous support provided by our alumni and others through your generosity. We now have several targeted giving funds, please see the descriptions of these on page 6 and consider how you could help our students realize their passion in anthropology.

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  • MSU Forensic Anthropology Lab

    (left to right) PhD students Mari Isa, Elena Watson, and Alex Goots in the MSU Forensic Anthropology Lab working on the NIJ-funded research project focused on blunt force trauma to adult crania.

    The MSU Forensic Anthropology Laboratory, directed by Dr. Joseph Hefner, provides some of the best forensic anthropology PhD training in the country thanks to the program’s incredible research, teaching, and service opportunities. Under the supervision of Dr. Todd Fenton, Dr. Joseph Hefner, and Dr. Carolyn Isaac, graduate students gain experience conducting public service forensic work and teaching undergraduate courses. The laboratory’s unparalleled research, primarily funded through the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), contributes to forensic sciences, biomechanical sciences and law enforcement worldwide.

    Over the past decade, Dr. Todd Fenton, has received three large grants totaling over $1.7 million dollars from the NIJ. These grants have funded several research projects that are interdisciplinary, cross-college collaborations with co-PIs Dr. Roger Haut, University Distinguished Professor Emeritus of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and Dr. Feng Wei of the Department of Radiology through the Orthopaedic Biomechanics Laboratory. The work has also provided excellent opportunities for our own forensic anthropology PhD students (Mari Isa, Alex Goots, and Elena Watson) who are actively involved in the current project. Over the past decade, several past and present MSU Anthropology graduate students have worked on the preceding interdisciplinary skeletal trauma research endeavors including Caitlin Vogelsberg, Emily Streetman, Carolyn (Hurst) Isaac (PhD 2013), and Nick Passalacqua (PhD 2012). These projects address significant gaps in forensic science by providing experimental data and analytical recommendations for interpreting blunt cranial trauma.

    PhD student and Dr. Todd Fenton work in the MSU forensics lab
    PhD student Mari Isa and Dr. Todd Fenton work in the forensic lab

    The collaboration between the two laboratories grew from a natural intersection between the Forensic Anthropology Lab’s role as a consulting laboratory for law enforcement agencies and medical examiner’s offices across the state of Michigan, and the Orthopaedic Biomechanics Labs’ research on joint trauma. As anthropologists and engineers collaborated to determine the most likely causes of injuries in forensic cases involving complicated skeletal trauma, the need for research specifically addressing this issue became clear.

    Their current project combines data from biomechanical experiments, computer modeling, and fracture pattern analysis to predict and document how variables like the location of an impact, the shape of an implement, or the energy of a blow affect patterns of cranial fracture. The goal of the project is to provide forensic practitioners with better tools to make scientific assessments about the circumstances of an injury based on cranial fracture patterns.

    Dr. Joe Hefner, who joined the department in 2014, has also been awarded NIJ and other funding for his research on craniomorphic forensic standards. With the help of his graduate students, Kelly Kamnikar and Amber Plemons, and recent innovations in our laboratory, standard definitions and illustrations of traits that can be seen by the eye and observed without measurements (macromorphoscopic) have been created. These standards are intended to reduce subjectivity and inter- and intra-observer error within databases used for forensic sciences. Creating this standard database necessitates large scale data collection so our researchers have traveled around the country and as far away as Khon Kaen, Thailand for this project.

    The research being conducted addresses significant gaps in forensic science standards by: (1) correlating ancestry and the appearance of certain cranial traits in large and globally-diverse samples; (2) establishing a database (The Macromorphoscopic Databank, MaMD) of modern, forensically-significant populations; and, (3) developing appropriate statistical methods for the identification of ancestry in an easy-to-use computer program.

    Dr. Carolyn Isaac, an MSU PhD alumni, joined the department and MSUFAL in 2019. She is a recipient of an NIJ grant to develop a database of cranial vault fractures of known age. By documenting the histological environment at specified times with associated gross, radiographic, and histologic information, she established phases of cranial fracture healing. The goal of this project is to generate baseline empirical data on the cells and tissues involved in fracture healing at different stages and to provide forensic practitioners with a method to estimate the age of a healing fracture. Such estimations can aid in determining whether an injury contributed to death,
    whether there are multiple injuries of various ages indicting a pattern of abuse, and may directly contribute to the manner of death classification (homicide, suicide, accident, natural, or indeterminate).

    MSU graduate students work on forensics in Thailand
    Amber Plemons, Dr. Joe Hefner and Kelly Kamnikar collecting cranial data in Thailand

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  • Professor Ethan Watrall Co-PI on $1.47 Million Grant from Mellon Foundation

    Professor Ethan Watrall Co-PI on $1.47 Million Grant from Mellon Foundation

    dr watrall in front of a book caseThe Department of Anthropology is very pleased to announce that Professor Ethan Watrall is one of the Principal Investigators that has been awarded a major grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.  The project, entitled Enslaved: People of the Historical Slave Trade, is collaboration with MATRIX: The Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences (where Watrall serves as Associate Director) and the Department of History.  The $1.47 million grant will fund the first 18-month phase of a multi-phase plan to build and launch an online platform that will link and provide access to millions of pieces of data about that transatlantic slave trade drawn from multiple universities, cultural heritage institutions, and scholarly projects. The platform will provide unprecedented search and data visualization tools for historians, historical anthropologists, and historical archaeologists interested in the transatlantic slave trade.

    The platform will be completely open and free to use by scholars and members of the general public.

    Dean Rehberger, (Director of MATRIX: The Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences; Interim Chair, Sociology ADA Liaison; Associate Professor, Department of History) will lead the project along with Walter Hawthorne (College of Social Science, Associate Dean; Professor, Department of History) and Ethan Watrall (Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology).

    Watrall is internationally recognized for his experience and expertise in the domain of digital heritage and archaeology.  Most recently he was Director (with Professor Lynne Goldstein) of the National Endowment for the Humanities funded Institute for Digital Archaeology Method and Practice and Co-Director (with Professor Candace Keller from the Department of Art, Art History, and Design) of the National Endowment for the Humanities funded Digital Archive of Malian Photography.  He is Currently Co-Director (with Professor Jon Frey from the Department of Art, Art History, and Design) of the National Endowment for the Humanities funded ARCS: Archaeological Resource Cataloging System. In addition, he directs the Cultural Heritage Informatics Graduate Fellowship Program and the Fieldschool in Digital Heritage (both of which live under the umbrella of the Department of Anthropology’s Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative)

    old slavery billboard

    The full press release from Michigan State University can be found at http://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2018/msu-uses-15m-mellon-foundation-grant-to-build-massive-slave-trade-database/

     

     

     

    Click here to read the Spring 2018 newsletter.

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  • MSU Forensic Anthropology Lab Brings Closure to Families

    MSU Forensic Anthropology Lab Brings Closure to Families

    Dr. Joe Hefner of the MSU Forensic Anthropology Lab, housed within the Department of Anthropology, was recently featured on ABC 12 News, a local Mid-Michigan subsidiary. When human remains are found by the Michigan State Police, they are brought to the MSU Forensic Anthropology Lab for identification, as was the case this fall when remains were found in both Saginaw and Flint. Hefner and his team of colleagues and graduate students work tirelessly to create a biological profile of the unidentified individual so that comparisons can be made to existing medical records. These comparisons allow both a positive identification of the body to made and a cause of death determined so that the family can be notified. Their job “is to provide closure for the families first and foremost,” says Hefner.

    To watch the full interview on ABC 12, click here.

    This is not the only job of the lab however. Contained within the Department of Anthropology at Michigan State University, their facility is a teaching area where students come from far and wide to learn forensic and human remain identification techniques. Dr. Hefner and his colleagues hold teaching and research positions as well as the work they do for the Michigan State Police and other law enforcement agencies. The graduate students that work in the lab with him also attend the university full time as anthropology graduate students, completing Master’s and PhD.s and hold part time assistantships as teaching assistants for classes across the university in areas like anatomy, biology and anthropology.

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  • Congratulations Dr. Ryan Klataske!

    Dr. Ryan Klataske defends his dissertation.The Department of Anthropology is pleased to announce it’s newest PhD., Dr. Ryan Klataske.

    We are proud to see Ryan come to the completion of his graduate school career here at MSU after the successful defense of his dissertation on December 8th. The department faculty and staff wish Ryan and his family all the best as he moves forward with his professional career.

    Dr. Klataske’s dissertation entitled Wildlife Management and Conservation on Private Land in Namibia: An Ethnographic Account documents the use of common property as a tool for wildlife management and conservation on private ranchland in Namibia. Based on 13 months of ethnographic research, it examines how and why groups of white ranchers have used common property as a tool for managing common-pool wildlife across boundaries of private land. These arrangements and the territories they govern are called freehold or commercial conservancies. His work suggests that common property offered not only a tool for conservation, but also a strategy for survival in post-apartheid southern Africa. By working together, these ranchers attempted to construct a new niche for themselves based on the conservation and sustainable use of African wildlife. Since the early 1990s, freehold conservancy members have transformed their relationship to wildlife and each other, contributing to the conservation of wildlife and habitat on private land. Yet, despite their accomplishments, many ranchers see their efforts as failing or falling short. Their disillusionment stems from the politics of land, fear of a potentially predatory state, and an insecure sense of belonging.

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  • Dr. Lovis named editor for Midwest Archaeological Perspectives Series

    Dr. William LovisDr. William (Bill) Lovis has been named the inaugural Editor for a new book series, Midwest Archaeological Perspectives, launched by a partnership between the Midwest Archaeological Conference, Inc. and the University of Notre Dame Press.  The series will include the most compelling and current works of archaeological narrative and insight for the American Midwest region, exploring standing questions from new vantage points, and innovative new questions arising from the deployment of cutting edge theory and method.

    The American Mid-continent, stretching from the Appalachians to the Great Plains, and from the Boreal Forests to the Gulf of Mexico, is home to a rich and deep multi-ethnic past that even after 150 years of exploration continues to fascinate scholars and the public alike. Beginning with colonization by the first Native American big game hunters, through the origins of domestic food production and construction of the largest earthen monuments in North America, and ultimately the entry of multiple colonial empires and their varying interactions with native populations, the story of the region is an exciting one of changing cultural and environmental interactions and adaptive strategies. The diverse environments that characterize the region have fostered a multiplicity of solutions to the problem of survival, ranging from complex sedentary agriculturally intensive societies to those with highly refined seasonal resource strategies keyed to timed movement and social flexibility.

    For more information about this series, check out the Midwest Archaeological Perspectives page here.

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