Spring 2010
In May 2010, Alexander Bauer's book (co-edited with Anna Agbe-Davies), Social Archaeologies of Trade and Exchange will be published by Left Coast Press. The goal of this volume is to recognize trade as a fundamentally social activity concerned not only with the movement of goods, but also on the social context and consequences of that exchange. The contributions discuss trade on a range of scales and themes such as exchange as a communicative act, the ways in which exchange transforms the relationship between people and things, the significance of agency and power in contexts of trade, and how sites of consumption and discard speak to processes of exchange.

---

Professor Timothy Pugh was awarded a grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation to support his project “The Colonial Process at Tayasal, Petén, Guatemala.”

---

In June 2010, Prof. Mandana Limbert's book, In the Time of Oil: Piety, Memory, and Social Life in an Omani Town, will be published by Stanford University Press. Focusing on shifting structures of governance and new forms of sociality as well as on the changes brought by mass schooling, piped water, and the fracturing of close ties with East Africa, Mandana Limbert shows how personal memories and local histories produce divergent notions about proper social conduct, piety, and gendered religiosity. With close attention to the subtleties of everyday life and the details of archival documents, poetry, and local histories, Limbert provides a rich historical ethnography of oil development, piety, and social life on the Arabian Peninsula.

---

In May 2010, Prof. Karen Strassler's book, Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java, was published by Duke University Press. In this book, Karen Strassler argues that popular photographic practices have played a crucial role in the making of modern national subjects in postcolonial Java. Contending that photographic genres cultivate distinctive ways of seeing and positioning oneself and others within the affective, ideological, and temporal location of Indonesia, she examines genres ranging from state identification photos to pictures documenting family rituals.

Fall 2009
In October 2009, Prof. Murphy Halliburton's book, Mudpacks and Prozac: Experiencing Ayurvedic, Biomedical, and Religious Healing, an ethngraphic study of healing in India, was published by Left Coast Press. This book tells about people seeking psychiatric healing choose from an almost dizzying array of therapies-from the medicated mudpacks of Ayurveda, to the pharmacopeia of Western biomedicine, to the spiritual pathways of the world's religions. How do we choose, what do the treatments offer, and how do they cure? In Mudpacks and Prozac, Murphy Halliburton investigates the very different ways in which Western, Ayurvedic, and religious (Christian, Muslim, and Hindu) healing systems define psychiatric problems and cures. He describes people's embodied experiences of therapies that range from soothing to frightening, and explores how enduring pleasure or pain affects healing. And through evocative portraits of patients in Kerala, India-a place of incredible cultural diversity that has become a Mecca for alternative medicine-Halliburton shows how sociopolitical changes around the globe may be limiting the ways in which people seek and experience health care, with negative effects on our quality of health and quality of life.

---

John Collins' "A razão barroca do patrimônio baiano: Contos de tesouro e histórias de ossadas no Centro Histórico de Salvador," ["Bahian Patrimony's Baroque Reason: Treasure Tales and Skeletal Histories in Salvador's Historical Center,"] has appeared in the Revista de Antropologia, 51(1): 29-73. Revista de Antropologia is one of Latin America's leading social scientific journals and Professor Collins' article was also presented at the First Annual Annual Brazilian-U.S. Anthropological Conference, University of São Paulo, Summmer 2008.

---

Omri Elisha (Ph.D. NYU 2005) has joined the Department of Anthropology as an Assistant Professor starting Fall 2009. Omri Elisha is a cultural anthropologist whose research interests include anthropology of religion, Evangelicalism/Christianity, urban anthropology, and North American ethnography.
In the fall of 2009 Professor Elisha was awarded the eighth annual Cultural Horizons Prize by Society for Cultural Anthropology for his article "Moral Ambitions of Grace: The Paradox of Compassion and Accountability in Evangelical Faith-Based Activism" published in Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 1 (February 2008): 154-189.

---

Tom Plummer's paper entitled "Oldest Evidence of Toolmaking Hominins in a Grassland-Dominated Ecosystem" has been published in September issue of PLoS ONE.In this paper Dr. Plummer and his colleagues demonstrate that grassland-dominated ecosystems did in fact exist during the Plio-Pleistocene, and that early Homo was active in open settings. Comparison with other Oldowan occurrences indicates that by 2.0 Ma hominins, almost certainly of the genus Homo, used a broad spectrum of habitats in East Africa, from open grassland to riparian forest. This strongly contrasts with the habitat usage of Australopithecus, and may signal an important shift in hominin landscape usage.
PDF

---

Doreen Schmitt received a Presidential Adjunct Teaching Award this year.

---

Timothy Pugh received a grant from the National Science Foundation supporting archaeological research at the site of Tayasal in Petén, Guatemala. His article Contagion and Alterity: Kowoj Maya Appropriations of European Objects appeared in American Anthropologist. He co-edited the book Maya Worldview at Conquest in which he wrote the Preface and a chapter entitled Maya Sacred Landscapes at Contact. His review of Sanctuaries of Earth, Stone, and Light: The Churches of Northern New Spain,1530–1821 appeared in Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology.

---

Jim Moore presented a paper "Too Much History for This Present: The Construction of Cultural Heritage" at Long Island Archaeology: A Public Symposium on Recent Research on September 26, 2009, 1-5pm in 301 Wang Center, Stony Brook University.

---

On October 9, 2009, Kate Pechenkina spoke at Harvard University East Asian Archaeology Seminar about "Life in the Early Farming Communities of Northern China."

---

Article by Professor Kevin Birth "Time and the Biological Consequences of Globalization" has been selected as an Honorable Mention for the 2009 General Anthropology Division Award for Exemplary Cross-Field Scholarship.

---

On September 12 Timothy Pugh spoke at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology about “Spanish Things in Maya Worlds: the Archaeology of First Contact”. In July, he presented a paper Cosas Europeas en el Mundo Maya del Periodo Contacto at the XXIII Simposio de Investigaciones Arqueologías en Guatemala. Dr. Pugh is now the director of Proyecto Arqueológico Tayasal.

---

End of the Term Party
On Wednesday 12/09, the Anthro Club hosted an End of the Term Anthropology Party featuring Anthro-Jeopardy and Bone-Bee contests. The top spot in Anthro-Jeopardy was split among Heather Nitschke, Philip Appleby, Alexandra Brackett, and Nardai Mootoo. Runners up were Jon Claude Gocheekit, Jose Karlos, and Ronveer Chakraborty.

At first, "Bone-bee," which involved blindly identifying bones inside a black bag, had the jury worried, as nobody could be eliminated initially . After Matilda correctly guessed the first proximal pedal phalanx, Nardai the medial cuneiform, and Josh identified lower second molar, the jury began to deploy fragments. The last two contestants standing were Casey Paganetti and Josh Wilcox, who both identified a scapula based on a small fragment of its inferior angle. The runners-up were Nikki Brigati, Matilda Chanax-Gonzalez, and Nardai Mootoo.

---

Queens College Anthropology major Josh Wilcox participated in the excavation of a Paleolithic (presumably) neanderthal site in the southern Caucuses of Armenia this June under the supervision of Daniel Adler of the University of Connecticut. The Middle to Upper Paleolithic inhabitants of the rock shelter where the excavation took place produced prolific amounts of blade tools made from obsidian. The nature of these tools, distributed over the geological span of millenia, reveal a significant amount of sophistication and care in their construction, as well a faithful transmission of the culture through many generations. Associated with these tools were various fragmentary faunal remains, notably bovids and horses, as well as rodent microfauna. The latter likely being a result of later invasive burrowing. Whether these fauna were eaten or merely cohabited with the humans is as of yet unknown.

---

In May 2010, Alexander Bauer's book (co-edited with Anna Agbe-Davies), Social Archaeologies of Trade and Exchange was published by Left Coast Press. The goal of this volume is to recognize trade as a fundamentally social activity concerned not only with the movement of goods, but also on the social context and consequences of that exchange. The contributions discuss trade on a range of scales and themes such as exchange as a communicative act, the ways in which exchange transforms the relationship between people and things, the significance of agency and power in contexts of trade, and how sites of consumption and discard speak to processes of exchange.

---

Professor Timothy Pugh was awarded a grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation to support his project “The Colonial Process at Tayasal, Petén, Guatemala.”

---

In June 2010, Prof. Mandana Limbert's book, In the Time of Oil: Piety, Memory, and Social Life in an Omani Town, was published by Stanford University Press. Focusing on shifting structures of governance and new forms of sociality as well as on the changes brought by mass schooling, piped water, and the fracturing of close ties with East Africa, Mandana Limbert shows how personal memories and local histories produce divergent notions about proper social conduct, piety, and gendered religiosity. With close attention to the subtleties of everyday life and the details of archival documents, poetry, and local histories, Limbert provides a rich historical ethnography of oil development, piety, and social life on the Arabian Peninsula.

---

In May 2010, Prof. Karen Strassler's book, Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java, was published by Duke University Press. In this book, Karen Strassler argues that popular photographic practices have played a crucial role in the making of modern national subjects in postcolonial Java. Contending that photographic genres cultivate distinctive ways of seeing and positioning oneself and others within the affective, ideological, and temporal location of Indonesia, she examines genres ranging from state identification photos to pictures documenting family rituals.

Spring 2008
On March 24th, 2008, Dr. Cameron L. McNeil was named the recipient of the 2008 Mary W. Klinger Book Award for the publication she edited, entitled Chocolate in Mesoamerica: A Cultural History of Cacao, published by University Press of Florida. The Klinger Book Award is among the highest honors awarded by the Society for ECONOMIC BOTANY. Dr. McNeil will be honored in Durham, North Carolina June 5th at the society's annual meeting.

Dr. Daniel F. Austin, Chair of the Awards Committee, said “Even for those of us who are addicted to chocolate, this book opens welcome new vistas. While many of us have worked in forests with wild Theobroma, and in areas of cultivation, most of us have a limited exposure to the cultural history of the plants. By bringing together distinct fields into one single resource, Dr. McNeil has done everyone a great service. The story of chocolate is as savory as the product!”

The Mary W. Klinger Book Award was established in 1996 and is annually awarded by the Society for an outstanding book publication. The Society for Economic Botany is the largest international scientific organization fostering and encouraging research and education on the past, present, and future uses of plants by people.

---

In April, several anthropology faculty members gave talks during the 77th Annual Meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Columbus, Ohio (April 9 - April 12, 2008):

Larissa Swedell, J. Saunders, M. Pines, A. Schreier and B. Davis. - Alternative reproductive strategies in male hamadryas baboons: leaders, followers, and solitary males.

Jennifer Muller - The frequency and etiology of rib fractures in the skeletal remains of Washington DC's African American poor

Sara Stinson - Factors influencing relative sitting height at high altitude.

Nelson Ting - Extinction of critically endangered West African colobus monkeys will lead to a major loss in molecular diversity.

---

During the 73rd Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in Vancouver (March 26 - March 30, 2008), several anthropology faculty members gave talks based on their current research:

Aaron Kendall—Material Culture and Viking Age Trade: Comparison of Artifacts from Icelandic Farm Sites.

Cameron McNeil—The Fragrance of Elite Identity: Flowers in Maya Temples and Tombs at Copan, Honduras.

Ekaterina Pechenkina and Xiaolin Ma — Trajectories of Health in Early Farming Communities of East Asia.

Timothy Pugh —Elite Uses of Spanish Material Culture in Contact Period Petén, Guatemala.

Joseph Ferraro, Tom Plummer, Briana Pobiner, Jim Oliver and Laura Bishop—Late Pliocene zooarchaeology of Kanjera South, Kenya.

---

Kevin Birth gave a talk at Franklin and Marshall College on Feb 18th. The title of his talk is "The Meaningful Irregularity of Time." The event is sponsored by Anthropology, Music, and Africana Studies.

Kevin Birth also has a new article out in the The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute called "The Creation of Coevalness and the Danger of Homochronism."

Summer 2007
Mandana Limbert received ACLS (American Council of Learned Societies) fellowship for this year (2007-2008) for her project Oman, Zanzibar, and the Politics of Becoming Arab.

---

Larissa Swedell's 2006-2007 Fulbright Scholarship at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, was renewed through the end of 2007. She will continue to teach at UCT and conduct research on South African chacma baboons until her return to New York in January 2008.

---

Dr. Kevin Birth's paper, entitled "The Creation of Coevalness and the Danger of Homochronism," has been accepted for publication by the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

---

Several new faculty members have joined the Department of Anthropology starting Fall 2007:

Frances Forrest, a Chancellor's Fellow at the Graduate Center's PhD Program in Anthropology, will be teaching Introduction to Human Evolution (ANTH102). Her research focuses on paleoanthropology.

Beatriz Perez-Sweeney, a recent graduate of Columbia University, will be offering Introduction to Human Evolution (ANTH102).
Her doctoral dissertation focuses on the molecular systematics of Leontopithecus (a group of New World primates) and population genetics of L. chrysopygus.

Ellas Kalamida , a recent graduate of Rutgers University, will be offering Introduction to Cultural Anthropology (ANTH101). She is a cultural anthropologist researching the symbolism of the revival of some old "rebetika" songs and their use for wedding parties.

May
On Monday, May 8th, 2007 the Queens College Department of Anthropology hosted the Annual Honors and Awards Ceremony to recognize our outstanding graduating Majors and Minors.

Student Awards for Department of Anthropology 2007 are:

Hortense Powdermaker Award:
Bracha Feit

Paul Mahler Memorial Award:
Simon Wong and Patricia Sherin

Lynn Ceci Archaeology Award:
Yocasta Peña-Brent

Faculty Award:
Bracha Feit and Raina Kulinski

Thesis Honors:
Yocasta Peña-Brent, Bracha Feit, José Vila

Most Promising Student Award:
Karina Ortega

Service Award:
Yocasta Peña-Brent

Honors:
Majors graduating with honors -
Bracha Feit, Meredith Ilchert, Simarpreet Kaur, Raina Kulinski, Tanya Moradi, Yocasta Peña-Brent, Patricia Sherin, Nicole Vega, Simon Wong, Jessie Yang, Martyna Zmijewska

Minors graduating with honors -
Sophie Antonopoulos, Linda Benzakarya, Kanwal Chaudhary, Melissa Chen, Joey Cohen, Lisa Ebe, Christie Lech, Olivia Olbrei, Markos Papadatos
April, 2007

On April 29, at the Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Warren DeBoer, served as a discussant in a symposium organized by former Queens College faculty member John Blitz, entitled "Neighborhood, Community, and Polity: Alternative Interpretations of Mississippian Societies."

---

On April 26, at the Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Tim Pugh gave a talk discussing his recent research in Guatemala, entitled "The Archaeology of Contact and Colonialism in Peten, Guatemala." Kate Pechenkina presented a talk on burial status and skeletal health at the Middle Yangshao site of Xipo in Northern China. Cameron McNeil gave a talk entitled "Lessons for the Present in Ancient Land-use Patterns."

---

On April 19, Sam Byrd gave a talk about his recent research, entitled "People Left Behind: Hidden Native Populations on the Gulf Coast," at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Anthropology of North America (SANA).

---

A paper by Dr. Kevin Birth, entitled "Time and the Biological Consequences of Globalization" has been published in the April issue of Current Anthropology. In this paper Professor Birth discusses temporal conflicts between locations on the globe, desynchronization of biological cycles, and lack of correspondence between those cycles and social life. The full text of this paper is available in CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 48, Number 2:215-236. PDF

---

March, 2007

On March 27, Tom Plummer and his collaborators, James Oliver, Colleen Delaney-Rivera, Fritz Hertel, Francis Forrest, and Jason Hodgson, presented a poster entitled "Expanding the taxonomic range of omnivores and carnivores in feeding experiments and the application of actualistic tooth mark data to zooarcheological analysis" to the Paleoanthropology Society 2007 Annual Meeting held at the Penn Museum at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

---

On March 31, Kate Pechenkina and her collaborator, Ma Xiaolin, presented a poster entitled "Work or violence: Tramatic injuries during the Chinese Neolithic," to the orfganized symposium on Bioarchaeological Perspectives on Migration and Human Health in Ancient East Asia. The symposium was held as a part of Seventy-Sixth Annual Meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists.

---

On March 30, an anthropology major, Patty Sherin, presented a poster entitled "Radiography of the pubic symphysis: an alternative method for the age at death estimation of human skeletal remains." to the Seventy-Sixth Annual Meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists.

---

On March 16, Professor Tim Pugh gave a guest lecture to the Anthropology Department of the University at Albany, SUNY, on his recent research in Maya Archaeology.

---

Professor Warren DeBoer has a chapter entitled
"Salient representations of the American Past" in the recently
releasededited volume A Pre-Columbian World, edited by
Jeffrey Quilter and Mary Miller. Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D. C.

---

On January 12, Professor Warren DeBoer gave a talk to the Biannual Meeting of Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America (SALSA), at Santa Fe, New Mexico.

---

Two new Adjunct Faculty Members will be joining the Department of Anthropology starting Spring 2007:

Cameron McNeil, a recent CUNY graduate, currently conducts research at Copan, Honduras. She will be offering Ecology and Culture (ANTH 302).

Aaron Kendall, Ph. D. Candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center, will be offering Introduction to Archaeology (ANTH 103). His research interests include North Atlantic Archaeology, the Viking Age, and Medieval economies and trade.

---

Cameron McNeil, who will teach Ecology and Culture in Spring 2007, recently published an edited volume called Chocolate in Mesoamerica: A Cultural History of Cacao. This volume brings together scholars in the fields of archaeology, history, art history, linguistics, epigraphy, botany, chemistry, and cultural anthropology to explore the domestication, preparation, representation, and significance of cacao in ancient and modern communities of the Americas, with a concentration on its use in Mesoamerica.
     From the botanical structure and chemical makeup of Theobroma cacao and methods of identifying it in the archaeological record, to the importance of cacao during the Classic period in Mesoamerica, to the impact of European arrival on the production and use of cacao, to contemporary uses in the Americas, this volume provides a richly informed account of the history and cultural significance of chocolate.
     Dr. Timothy Pugh also has a chapter called Cacao, Gender, and the Northern Lacandon God House in this volume.

---

During the month of November, serving as a forensic linguist, faculty member Doreen Schmitt participated in preliminary investigations relating to allegations against a municipal official of "contract steering" (deliberate wording of an open bid civil contract in such a manner that only a particular company/contractor offers the product/service). Although she was unable to adequately substantiate a claim of "non-genericity" (i.e., specificity) of the linguistic terminology involved, she did, however, uncover a possible "smoking gun" during the preparation of her report to the prosecutors. Schmitt alone requested and examined the original approved contract bid proposal document and noted that it differed significantly and critically from the alleged "true" copy on the contract in circulation--namely with regard to the subsequent insertion of the very linguistic terms at issue. This evidence strongly suggested that the defendant willfully and illicitly altered the approved original so as to steer the bidding process.

---

On November 18, Patty Sherin, an Anthropology major, received the student prize for best poster presented to the Biological Anthropology Section during the 105th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in San Jose. Her poster was entitled "Radiography of the pubic symphysis: aging human skeletal remains".

---

On November 16, Professor Murphy Halliburton gave a talk on his recent research to a session entitled "Resistant to Treatment: Drug-resistant Disease as a Medical, Social, and Public Health Problem" during the 105th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in San Jose.

---

During the last week of October Professor Warren DeBoer and Professor Jim Moore gave presentations to Foundations of Archaeological Inquiry Conference on "Invisible Citizens: Slavery in Ancient Pre-State Societies" at Snowbird, Utah

---

On November 16, Patty Sherin,an Anthropology major, presented a poster entitled "RADIOGRAPHY OF THE PUBIC SYMPHYSIS: AGING HUMAN SKELETAL REMAINS" to the 105th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in San Jose.

---

On October 28, Francisco Mesa and Grace Seo, anthropology majors, with Marc Tollis, a biology major, presented a poster entitled "Evaluation of two sampling methods to assess vegetation in an Acacia-Scrub Savannah" at the Metropolitan Association of College and University Biologists conference 8.

---

Markos Papadatos, anthropology manor, has recently published two articles in The Knight News. His articles are entitled " Justice: For the Individual or the Immigrant?" and " "Little Children," Big Movie."

---

Lauren Talerman,an Anthropology majorwone Boren Undergraduate Scholarship to study Arabic in Egypt this past summer. Read about Lauren Talerman in Queens College Faculty and Staff News.

---

During the first week of October, Patty Sherin,an Anthropology major, was visiting the National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C. She obtained radiographs of more than 100 os coxae belonging to modern human skeletons from the Robert J. Terry Anatomical Skeletal Collection while at the museum. This collection consists of the skeletons of individuals with a known age at death and a record of their medical history, allowing a controlled study of age related changes in the pubic symphysis.

---

A paper by Markos Papadatos, an Anthropology minor, entitled "Queens College Wins Cisco Award" has been published in The Knight News. Read the paper.

---

Doreen Schmitt provided expert testimony as a forensic linguist which contributed to a favorable settlement for the plaintiffs in an age discrimination civil lawsuit . This positive outcome of the case resulted even despite a prior finding of "no reasonable cause" by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) against the plaintiffs.

---