Department of Anthropology

  • 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.”

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  • Featured Faculty, Dr. Kurt Rademaker

    Featured Faculty, Dr. Kurt Rademaker
    man in hat
    Dr. Kurt Rademaker

    Dr. Kurt Rademaker started with MSU Anthropology in Fall of 2018. His research focuses on human biogeographic expansion into the Andes mountains and adds to our understanding of the timing and routes of initial human settlement of the Americas and the role of ecological variability in driving human adaptations and in understanding the relationships between humans and their environments. Learning about the human past is essential for understanding the history and evolution of the environments we inhabit.

    Dr. Rademaker’s current projects include excavations of archaeological sites from the Pacific Coast to the high Andes, as well as surveys in remote, unexplored areas to discover new sites. Archaeological sites indicate that people were connected over large areas, his research seeks to understand when and how those connections formed, how they functioned and were sustained over time. His work collaborates with physical anthropologists, paleogeneticists and earth scientists to study what past environments were like and how these have changed over time. It is thrilling to think about the first groups of people moving into new and uninhabited continents.

    Kurt’s team has discovered that ice age environments in the Andes were not as hostile as people used to think and that early Americans could settle these high mountain environments at the end of the last ice age. His work has been featured in popular media outlets such as National Geographic, the BBC, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Smithsonian, Sapiens, and many others. He feels it is important to share these discoveries with the global public. His work examines long-term Andean environmental change and its impact on past humans. He hopes what he learns will prove useful for current and future Andean people as they cope with climatic change.

    Rademaker’s Team at Cuncaicha Rockshelter

    Currently, Dr. Rademaker is expanding beyond southern Peru to build transects of archaeological sites and paleoenvironmental records along the Andes. This work will allow them to explore variability in environmental change and human adaptive patterns. He is excited to be a part of a strong Anthropology department with excellent, supportive faculty and a vibrant community of graduate and undergraduate students. One of his favorite things about his work is that every day has the potential of discovering something new that no one has ever learned before. This is true both in the field and the lab.

    Dr. Rademaker became interested in anthropology when he took an intro class as an undergraduate student at the University of Kentucky. By the time he took his second class, Introduction to Archaeology, he was hooked. That initial interest just deepened with time, after a field school and working in cultural resource management, leading him to pursue his PhD from the University of Maine in 2012. Outside of his work, Kurt loves exploring the outdoors with his wife Erica and their dog Cowboy and are glad to live in a state with lots of nature and opportunities for canoeing, hiking, camping. In the Andes and elsewhere he loves climbing high mountains and some of his other hobbies include motorcycles and gardening.

    Kurt has two new publications in preparation on the site formation of Cuncaicha rockshelter and the digital cranial reconstruction of a 9000-year-old Andean highlander referred to as the Lady of Cuncaicha. We welcome Dr. Rademaker and look forward to more exciting research. For more information about his work, check out his working group’s website: www.paleoandes.com

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  • Dr. Ethan Watrall Receives DEADDA Grant

    The Department of Anthropology is pleased to announce that Assistant Professor Ethan Watrall is part of a team recently awarded a European Cooperation of Science & Technology grant for the Saving European Archaeology from the Digital Dark Age (SEADDA) Project. The project is based on the premise that making archaeological data open and freely accessible is a priority across Europe because the digital realm lacks appropriate, persistent repositories. The result is that, due to the fragility of digital data and non-repeatable nature of most archaeological research, we are poised to lose a generation of research to a “digital dark age.”  Mitigating this crisis will bring archaeologists and data management specialists together to share expertise and create resources allowing them to address problems in the most appropriate way within their own countries. While important international standards exist, there is no single way to build a repository. To be successful, archaeologists must be at the decision-making heart of how their data is archived to ensure re-use is possible.

    The SEADDA Project, based at the University of York (UK) and made up of scholars from 26 countries, will address these challenges by establishing a priority research area in the archiving, dissemination, and open access re-use of archaeological data. It brings together an interdisciplinary network of archaeologists and computer scientists; experts in archaeological data management and open data dissemination and re-use. The project will create publications and materials, setting state of the art standards for archaeological archiving across Europe. The project will also organize meetings and training, allowing archaeologists from countries with archiving expertise to work with archaeologists with few or no available options, so they may share knowledge and create dialogue within their countries and move forward to address the crisis.

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  • 3rd Annual Endowed Alumni & Friends of Archaeology Lecture

    Greg Hare in the Yukon
    Dr. Greg Hare

    Greg Hare, the former Yukon Archaeologist and Senior Projects Archaeologist with the Government of Yukon, Canada, recently retired after 30 years of service, visited MSU from March 11-15th, 2019 as the 3rd Annual Alumni and Friends of Archaeology Endowed Lecture Series. While here, Dr. Hare gave a department talk entitled, “Global Warming and Melting Ice Looking into the Past – Preparing for the Future” where he discussed how increasing global temperatures have created both serious challenges and unique opportunities for archaeology in the circumpolar north. He also gave a public talk entitled, “The Yukon Ice Patch Project Ancient Artifacts Melting from Alpine Ice.” This talk provided an overview of the Yukon Ice Patch Project and explored the collaborative working relationship with indigenous communities and implications for heritage management. His talk reviewed the challenges posed by environmental change, the newly developing field of glacial archaeology and possible implications for international research agendas.

    Dr. Hare is an editor of the Journal of Glacial Archaeology, Sheffield, U.K. and in 2012 he was program chair for Frozen Pasts – the 3rd International Glacial Archaeology Conference, in Whitehorse Yukon. He studied anthropology and archaeology at the University of Victoria and University of Alberta, Canada and lives in Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada.

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  • Dr. Goldstein Receives Lifetime Achievement Award

    Dr. Lynne Goldstein Receives Society for American Archaeology Lifetime Achievement Award

    The Department of Anthropology is pleased to announce Dr. Lynne Goldstein (Professor Emerita of Anthropology and Founding Director of the Campus Archaeology Program) received the Society for American Archaeology Lifetime Achievement Award at the 84th Annual Meeting in Albuquerque New Mexico on April 12, 2019. This prestigious award is in recognition of her pivotal theoretical and empirical contributions to the field, in the areas of mortuary archaeology, Midwestern prehistory, historical archaeology, archaeological ethics and repatriation, public engagement, as well as professional and institutional leadership.

    Lynne Goldstein earned her BA degree in Anthropology from Beloit College in 1971 and her MA and PhD from Northwestern University (in 1973 and 1976, respectively). Her commitment to archaeology began even earlier, in her high school days through volunteer work at the Field Museum of Natural History and participation in the Kampsville Project. Over the course of her career, she taught at both the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (1976-1996) and Michigan State University (1996-2018) and chaired both departments. She retired from MSU in August 2018 and now holds emerita status.

    Over the 48-year period of her career (and more than 65 publications and 200 conference papers), she has made fundamental theoretical and empirical contributions to archaeology. One of the hallmarks of Goldstein’s career has been her intellectual curiosity and enthusiasm about taking on new projects and exploring a range of different research questions. This curiosity, when coupled with her advocacy for public engagement with archaeology and her passion for communicating archaeological knowledge to diverse audiences, has driven her involvement in an array of projects.

    Her service to the SAA has been recognized by five Presidential Recognition Awards. Her service, both on the SAA Task Force on Repatriation and as an advisor, from 1990-2010 made important contributions to the form and implementation of NAGPRA legislation. She also served on the Smithsonian Repatriation Committee for many years. Lynne served as Secretary of the SAA (1988-1991), editor of American Antiquity (1996-2000), as co-Chair with Barbara Mills on the Task Force on Gender and Research Grants Submission (2013-2019), and currently chairs the SAA Publication Committee (2018-2021). She was similarly active in the American Anthropological Association, serving as Publication Director for the Archaeology Section (2013-2017), Liaison to the Register of Professional Archaeologists (2016-2018), and on additional committees. This does not even touch upon her leadership in the Midwest Archaeological Conference, Wisconsin Archaeological Survey, Florida Public Archaeology Network, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and other national and regional organizations. Dr. Goldstein has chaired 18 dissertation committees, served on dozens more, and mentored graduate (and undergraduate) students in programs around the US, in the United Kingdom, and beyond. We thank her for her service and look forward to keeping up with her retirement.

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  • New Digital Heritage Imaging Lab Opens

    Inside the new DHI Lab

    There is a new space in McDonel Hall for digital applications in archaeology. The Digital Heritage Imaging and Innovation Lab, or DHI Lab, held its grand opening on Thursday, May 2nd, 2019. This lab, housed in E36 of McDonel Hall, offers three main types of imaging techniques: 3D scanning, RTI (reflective transformance imaging), augmented and virtual reality, as well as 3D printing stations, a photogrammetry station and other digitization methods. This new space also houses equipment and services for digital documentation, digital preservation, and digitally enabled public engagement. In addition to the technologies housed within, its primary work space is set up for classes, workshops, individual research, or group projects. The idea for this new learning space was fostered through a collaboration among LEADR staff and Anthropology faculty with two main motivations for creating the space. The Department of Anthropology wanted to embrace our growing strength in digital cultural heritage. This idea, coupled with the success of LEADR, created a unique opportunity to develop a space supporting a lab for faculty and graduate/undergraduate students interested in applying digital methods and computational approaches to material culture.

    While this lab has been operating under its soft opening throughout Fall Semester 2018 to work out the kinks, the Open House to demonstrate its full capabilities to the public, occurred during the late morning of May 2nd with refreshments being offered and students and faculty on hand to display the new technologies. This new learning space will help support digital components in archaeological field schools, provide experiential learning, hands on learning, and applied learning. The experiences obtained from this lab will serve students choosing to go on to any digital field and will offer them very marketable skills in digital methods. It is geared primarily towards 3D capture, virtual reality, and 3D printing of material culture and collections.

    The new DHI Lab is run by the Department of Anthropology and is part of the LEADR family of facilities. Funds for this digital learning space came from a combination of Anthropology and TLE funds from the Provost’s office (technology, learning, environments). Some of the current projects already in the works here include the Campus Archaeology Program utilizing 3D capture, 3D capture of archaeology collections from the MSU Museum, a collaborative project with the Michigan History Center digitizing Michigan relics, and a Masters thesis by anthropology student Taylor Panczak.

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  • Alumna, Dr. Megan McCullen

    Dr. Megan McCullen at Chaco Canyon World Heritage Site
    Dr. Megan McCullen at Chaco Canyon World Heritage Site

    We are very proud to announce that our alumna, Dr. Megan McCullen, is the new Director of the Gordon L. Grosscup Museum of Anthropology & Planetarium at Wayne State University. Dr. McCullen’s position was created as a full-time position in 2017 by the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at Wayne State. Prior to this, a faculty member in the Anthropology Department was the Museum Director in addition to their regular faculty duties, and the Planetarium had a similar set up within the Physics Department. The goal of creating a new position was to have a person who can take the lead on managing the unique resources of the college that are used not only by students, but also by the community.

    As Director of the Anthropology Museum and Planetarium, Dr. McCullen fills many rolls as each have distinct missions. Officially, she works for the Dean’s Office, so part of her role as Director is to conceptualize how the public community sees and uses college resources – as well as how the university and departmental communities use these same resources. Her day to day job includes grant writing, working with the college’s advancement team, marketing, developing exhibitions and programming, creating, and maintaining community partnerships, curating the museum’s collection, and supervising student projects in the museum. She also oversees the student employees, who are the only other staff of the museum.

    The driving factor of Dr. McCullen’s work is her interest in making the resources of the University more accessible to the community surrounding them. One of her goals is to increase the number of community members coming to campus to visit the Museum and Planetarium, and to bring these resources out into the community as well. Megan has been working to fund programs to reduce barriers to access of the museum. She became interested in this when she began volunteering in museums as an undergraduate and has continued to work in museums and outreach since that time. Her experience curating, cataloging, and researching museum collections in graduate school here at MSU prepared her for her current collections management efforts.

    Dr. McCullen’s favorite thing about her job is that she enjoys working with the public and developing new ways to engage communities both on and off campus. The Director position also requires her to learn many new things, like astronomy and the history of her new museum. As an academic these learning opportunities are welcome. Megan also enjoys being in a position to think holistically and broadly about future projects. Part of her role is to think about what they want to be doing five or ten years down the road, what they need to do to get there, and how to collaborate with other sectors of the College and the community to do so. This includes everything from exhibitions to curation plans. She has always been one for thinking about connections and relationships, so she truly enjoys being in a position where building and maintaining these kinds of relationships is an important part of her work.

    Megan’s interest in archaeology started in a course in Egyptology. As the class studied pre-dynastic Egypt and she learned about the stone tools ancient peoples made, she became fascinated with how archaeologists decode material culture to understand how past societies lived. This led her to graduate school and she earned her Ph.D. from our department in 2015. Dr. McCullen says that MSU prepared her for her current career connecting her with a job at a cultural center during her first year. Her advisor, Dr. O’Gorman, was on the center’s board and informed her about the job opening which gave her experience in K-12 education and outreach, community partnerships, grant writing and small-scale exhibit development. Her advisor also allowed her to participate in a funded project to re-evaluate a large museum collection, which led to her dissertation project and further research using museum collections. All these wonderful experiences within our department and at MSU offered her the preparation needed for her current Director position.

    Dr. McCullen still keeps in touch with her MSU mentors. Last fall, Dr. John Norder rescued her when her car broke down on the highway outside Lansing. “You can’t ask for that kind of help if you don’t keep in touch,” she says. She has called her dissertation co-chairs (O’Gorman and Norder) several times during her first year at my current position seeking advice, and to discuss shared research interests.

    Currently, the Gordon L. Grosscup Museum of Anthropology at Wayne State University just opened an exhibit entitled The Secret Life of Things: Sixty Years of Museum Anthropology at Wayne State, which highlights sixty objects from their collections that reflect the breadth and depth of their work. Dr. McCullen invites everyone to come by, say hello and explore their free museum.

    To read the rest of this newsletter, click here.

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  • Alumni & Friends of Archaeology Research Award

    Jeff Painter in an archaeology lab studying ancient pottery
    Jeff Painter collecting pottery metrics in the MSU archaeology lab

    The Alumni and Friends of Archaeology Expendable Fund, established to enhance research and learning of undergraduate and graduate students in the archaeology program through the MSU Department of Anthropology, awarded Jeff Painter funds for his dissertation research during the Summer of 2018. This was the second year for the Alumni and Friends of Archaeology Research Enhancement Award and Jeff was able to complete two trips to the Dickson Mounds Museum in west-central Illinois in order to gather data for his dissertation.

    Mr. Painter’s proposed dissertation seeks to better understand the role of cooking and foodways within social interaction by examining vessel use-wear and the distribution of vessels, cooking techniques, and cooking-related features across the site of Morton Village in central Illinois, a site of known prehistoric interaction between different cultural groups, the Larson site in central Illinois and the Tremaine Complex in western Wisconsin. By using the comparative sites, he hopes to document the traditions of cooking and foodways a local Mississippian group and an Oneota group outside the area of interaction.

    The allocated funds helped Jeff to defray the cost of gas, food, and necessary supplies to travel to The Dickson Mounds Museum (DMM), which houses the Larson site materials. On Mr. Painter’s first trip to the museum, he examined ceramics for use-wear and also collected morphological measurements. On the subsequent trip, he collaborated with Alan Harn, the site director of the 1970 Larson excavations, and obtained digital copies of excavation maps from the 1966 and 1970 excavations.

    Jeff is still in the process of data collection and has yet to start analyzing this data. Mr. Painter wanted to stress that the support provided by the Alumni and Friends of Archaeology Research Enhancement Award has been essential in continuing work on his proposed dissertation research.

    To read the rest of this newsletter, click here.

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  • New Research on the Peopling of the Americas

    An international research crew, including MSU Department of Anthropology Assistant Professor Kurt Rademaker and five team members, contributed some of the key ancient human remains that documented population dynamics in the Andean region. The results of this research were revealed in a recent article, “Reconstructing the Deep Population History of Central and South America,” published in the journal Cell Vol.175(5).

    In 2015, Dr. Rademaker’s team excavated several ancient individuals from Cuncaicha rockshelter, in the high-elevation Peruvian Andes. Dr. Rademaker hand-carried the three rare, ancient individuals which included a 9000-year-old female and two males dating from 4200 and 3300 years ago from Peru to labs in the Unites States and Germany for radiocarbon dating, CT scanning, stable isotope and paleogenetic analyses and then returned them to Peru. This work lead to the first high quality ancient DNA data from Central and South America, shedding light on a distinctive DNA type associated with the first widespread archaeological culture of North America, known as the Clovis culture.

    This work has also been featured in the New York Times, “Crossing From Asia, the First Americans Rushed Into the Unknown”. Dr. Rademaker says, “As an archaeologist, it is incredibly rewarding to collaborate with physical anthropologists and paleogeneticists to unravel the complex story of early Americans. Interdisciplinary efforts like this are the future of our fields.”

    To read the rest of this newsletter, click here.

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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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