I am so excited, now that the paperwork is finalized, that I have received an NSF DDRIG for my upcoming dissertation fieldwork! In addition to being an wonderful affirmation that the archaeological community beyond Michigan thinks my work is heading in the right direction, the support this award provides will be invaluable in ensuring I have the resources, support, and equipment I need to get the most out of my project.

For example: I'm interested in understanding what the prehistoric hunter-gatherers of Chachapoyas ate. Remains such as animal bones can help, but many kinds of foods may only be preserved as tiny seeds. Others, like tubers (e.g., manioc from the Amazon, or potatoes from the highlands) might only be detectable as starches on the tools used to process them. With funds from this NSF award, I'll be able to bring down a colleague (Venicia Slotten of UC Berkeley) who specializes in paleobotany. She'll help me build a flotation machine that I'll use to capture microbotanical samples. I'll also be able to send a selection of stone tools to Arqueobios, a laboratory based in Trujillo, Peru, to identify any starches that might be on them.

I'll also be partnering with licensed Peruvian archaeologist and anthropologist Natalí Aldave, who brings invaluable technical and administrative skills to the project, as well as years of experience on projects around the country. Her expertise in the Formative and later periods complements my strengths in the Pre-Ceramic; the exploratory nature of this project makes in hard to predict what materials and contexts we might uncover, but between us we should be prepared to handle just about anything.

The details of the award, including an abstract, are available here on the National Science Foundation website.

I’m so excited to announce that I’ve been offered a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA) fellowship! These fellowships, funded by the U.S. Department of Education, are designed to support projects which “deepen research knowledge on and help the nation develop capability in areas of the world not generally included in U.S. curricula.” Typically 80-100 of these fellowships are awarded in any given year (across all disciplines!), and I’m incredibly honored to be one of them in 2021.

The fellowship will support my travel and living expenses during my upcoming major dissertation field season—fingers crossed for March through December 2021. Nine and a half months will be by far the longest I’ve spent outside of the U.S. consecutively; I’m a little nervous, and very excited!

The funded project is titled “Paving the Way for Peruvian Agriculture: Ten Thousand Years of Human–Environment Interactions in Chachapoyas, Peru.” I’ll be doing excavation and laboratory analysis to evaluate how human-environment interactions in Chachapoyas, Peru influenced and reflected important cultural developments around South America, including the initial colonization, responses to Middle Holocene climate change, and the dispersal of domesticated plants out of the Amazon rainforest.

The Fulbright-Hays fellowship also includes some funding for research expenses, but to get the most of out the project I’m also getting ready to submit a proposal to the National Science Foundation, which could provide critical additional support for more local hires, more radiocarbon dates, and other important work.

In the meantime, be on the lookout for an upcoming feature of my work on the Museum of Anthropological Archaeology’s Instagram series “Catching Up in the Coffee Range," @umichanthroarch.
 
What I’m reading: Pearce, A. J., Beresford-Jones, D. G., & Heggarty, P. (2020). Rethinking the Andes–Amazonia Divide: A cross-disciplinary exploration. UCL Press.

It's been a busy spring!

On April 26, I successfully defended my dissertation proposal, entitled "Early Prehistoric Human Ecology in Chachapoyas, Peru." I spoke to a (virtual) room of my archaeological community (my peers, professors, mentors, and friends), explaining my plan to evaluation the suitability of that region in the ceja de selva--the transition zone between the Andes mountains and the Amazon rainforest--for occupation by prehistoric hunter-gatherers. I answered questions and got a lot of good advice. Although the University of Michigan curators recommended a few changes, they approved the project, making me officially ABD (All But Dissertation)!

The same week, I finished my year-long Foreign Language Area Scholarship, studying Quechua, the native language of the Inca, under the incomparable Adela Carlos-Rios. (A full post on that is forthcoming.)

In May, I took some time off on account of work-life balance. Still, I found out my first-ever academic paper has been accepted with revisions to my stretch journal (WOOHOO!) and got some modeling done for a project my lab group is working on.

Now, I'm writing this from a hotel in Anchorage, Alaska. Since the public health and political situations in Peru make working there impossible this summer, I found a job for a firm doing contract archaeology on a highway construction project up here. I miss Peru so much, but I'm looking forward to getting my hands in the dirt after way too long, and it promises to be an interesting project; it's a site-dense area, and we'll be doing primarily excavation of sites located in the project area in previous phases of work.

Throughout this year, I’ve been working Dr. Damani Partridge on a variety of projects focused on reducing inequalities in the anthropological graduate experience, supported by a Student/Faculty Ally Grant from my university (not a huge fan of that name). My current focus is setting up a series of informal workshops on publishing in each of the four subfields; these are part of a series discussing topics that are typically part of the “hidden curriculum,” to which students have varying levels of access depending on their race/ethnicity, gender, socio-economic status, nationality, disability status, and a slew of other factors. Our hope is that by talking about these topics in an organized setting to which all are invited, we can do a little bit to help level the playing field, which could have impacts on student success as we move through our graduate careers and beyond.

Dr. Partridge and I decided it would be best to offer these workshops separately for each subfield, since expectations and practices around publishing can vary so much. At the socio-cultural workshop I hosted last week, for example, I was struck by how different publishing rates for grad students were in that area of study compared to archaeology. I can’t imagine going onto the job market unpublished, but in socio-cultural anthropology that seems to be quite common!

These workshops are also timely for me personally—I submitted my first journal article a couple of weeks ago and am waiting with bated breath to hear back from the editors. The article is about the use of lithic analysis to better understand sedentary, agriculturalist groups in prehistoric Peru, a topic that I’ve come to explore through my collaborations with other scholars working in Chachapoyas, Peru, where the Ceramic Period is typically the focus of research.  With the archaeology publishing workshop coming up, I’m looking forward to getting some advice on navigating the review process.

I'm excited to announce that I'll be formally mentoring a UROP student this academic year! UROP,  the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program at the University of Michigan, matches several hundred first- and second-year students, and transfer students, each year with scholars looking to mentor young research assistants. The program is designed to create opportunities for minoritized students and those from non-traditional backgrounds, "creat[ing] conditions for an equitable, inclusive, and supportive educational environment where every person feels valued and has an opportunity to add value." 

The project my student will be working on is entitled "Mapping Prehistoric New World Hunter-Gatherers," a collaboration between myself, fellow grad student Ian Beggen, and our advisor Dr. Raven Garvey. Initially envisioned as an exploration of potential biases and other variables which may skew identification of archaeological sites on the landscape, the project has expanded as the ongoing pandemic has restricted our individual enterprises. Now a multi-stage endeavor, we are using environmental predictors to model expected prehistoric hunter-gatherer distributions, and hope compare our results to the distribution of known sites across various regions of the Americas. My UROP student will play a key role here, collecting information about sites and their locations from both literature and SHPOs and other government sources. 


Having benefited immensely from graduate-student mentorship when I was an undergrad, I am honored and excited for the opportunity to pay it forward, and introduce a young person to the challenges and rewards of academic research. I also can't help remembering that until two years ago, when I met my current fieldwork collaborator Dr. Anna Guengerich (Eckerd College), every project director I had ever had was a man. Across seven years, six separate field projects and four lab projects, I saw women as lab technicians, field assistants, and graduate employees, but never at the head of a project. (Goldstein et al. 2018 provide some insights into potential causes of this trend.) So I'm particularly excited that my UROP student won't share that experience; she is entering a woman-run project, in a woman-dominated lab space. I'm sure I'll make more than my share of mistakes as a mentor, but if I can help her feel that she belongs in science, at the leading a project or anywhere she might choose, I'll consider that a job well done.

What I'm Reading
Goldstein, Lynne, Barbara J. Mills, Sarah Herr, et al., 2018
Why Do Fewer Women than Men Apply for Grants after Their Ph.D.s?, American Antiquity 83(3): 367–386.

Tallavaara, Miikka, Jussi T. Eronen, and Miska Luoto, 2018
Productivity, biodiversity, and pathogens influence the global hunter-gatherer population density. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115(6):1232–1237. DOI:10.1073/pnas.1715638115.​