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.