Anthropology News Archive | 2012

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  • News | 2012

    • NovaScienceNow episode featuring the research of Dr. Kate Spradley, Dr. Michelle Hamilton, and Dr. Alberto Giordano. The episode title is "Can Science Stop Crime".

      The episode will air October 17, 2012 at 10:00pm on PBS.

    • Amy Poehler, Meredith Walker and Amy Miles have created the a new TV series called “Smart Girls at the Party”, and the current season features New Braunfels teen Anna Schautteet, who is an aspiring anthropologist and works on local archaeological digs through the Gault Archaeological Project. See the link below and read about Anna and her work.

    • Piedras Negras, a large site located on the Guatemalan side of the Usumacinta River, is of great importance to Mayanists because of its long and well preserved series of monuments. These sculptures, in the form of stela, altars, and wall panels, are central to the historiography of Maya studies. In her analysis of these inscriptions about fifty years ago, the scholar Tatiana Proskouriakoff proved that these texts primarily concern the lives and rituals of rulers, rather than gods. In this workshop, we will discuss the implications of Proskouriakoff’s argument for the understanding of dynastic history at Piedras Negras, as well as explore the further significance of these texts as instruments of political discourse.

    • As part of her National Institute of Justice (NIJ) supported "Project IDENTIFICATION: Developing Accurate Identification Criteria for Hispanic Individuals," Dr. Kate Spradley is developing a database on skeletal attributes of Hispanic skeletons that will be used to help identify migrants who die along the U.S.-Mexico Border.

      Dr. Spradley, Dr. Michelle Hamilton and Dr. Alberto Giordano (Department of Geography) recently published the results of a taphonomy project at the Forensic Anthropology Research Facility that assesses at how vultures modify human remains.

    • This anthology examines the "unfinished project of modernity" with respect to the unrealized potential for economic, social, and political development in Africa. It also shows how, facing the consequences of modernism, Africans in and out of the continent are responding to these unfinished projects drawing on (a) the customary, (b) the novelty of modernity, and (c) positive aspects of modernism, for the organization of their societies and the enrichment of their lives even as they contend with the negative aspects of modernity and modernism.

    • NIMBioS (National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis) is a new collaboration between the National Science Foundation and several governmental agencies in which working groups are chosen to focus on major scientific questions at the interface between biology and mathematics. Working groups are relatively small, focus on a well-defined topic with defined goals and metrics of success, and meet several times over a two-year period. Dr. Graham is one of a group of 15 international scholars chosen for the working group on "Play, Evolution, and Sociality."

      Dr. Graham and her colleagues were also interviewed for a new documentary "Seriously! The Future Depends on Play" by Gwen Gordon.