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.