News and Notes from around the department, on what also happens to be National Cappuccino Day:
Publications and Press
UF Anthropology Ph.D. Justin Dunnavant is featured in the latest issue of Science, highlighting his research at Estate Little Princess in St. Croix. You can find the online article here, which also includes a link to a .pdf version.
UF graduate student Terry Barbour and Dr. Ken Sassaman are the lead authors on a new paper, just published this week, in PNAS: “Rare pre-Columbian settlement on the Florida Gulf Coast revealed through high-resolution drone LiDAR.” Their findings were also featured on the website Ars Technica (link here). The original article can be found here.
AAA Vancouver UF Meet-Up
Are you heading to the AAA/CASCA meeting in Vancouver? The University of Florida Department of Anthropology will be hosting an informal gathering on Friday, November 22nd from 8:00pm until late! We are providing several trays of hors d’oeuvres, so come and unwind after the evening’s business meetings in Vancouver’s famous Gastown District. Stay tuned for further details.
Awards Section
I am pleased to announce three recipients of CLAS Dissertation fellowships:
Arianne Bouleau received a CLAS fellowship for her dissertation work, “Identifying Household-level Political Economy on the Maya/Spanish Frontier: A Zooarchaeological Perspective from Lamanai, Belize.”
Christina Callicott received a CLAS fellowship for her work, “Music, Plants and Medicine: Lamista Shamanism in the Age of Internationalization.”
Janet Finlayson received CLAS fellowship support for her research, “The Anatomical Variation of Corresponding Joint Surface Congruency and its Utility for the Resolution of Commingled Remains.”
Congratulations to all three!
Upcoming Talks
Shannon Lee Dawdy of the University of Chicago will give two talks:
On Tuesday, November 12, 2019, 4:00 pm, Smathers 100 will give a talk entitled Speculative Archaeology: The Politics of Disaster Debris. The debris pile from 134,000 New Orleans buildings damaged or destroyed by Hurricane Katrina is visible from space. Although there was some effort to recycle materials through a little-known global market in demolition debris, most of the rubble amassed in place. In the future, archaeologists might reasonably consider the hurricane landfill a monumental structure. In the 1970s, Bill Rathje boldly suggested that an archaeological approach to contemporary life can reveal things about ourselves that we didn’t know. Modern landfills were his field sites. This talk thinks through Rathje’s garbology and the exceptionalism of disaster sites. Contestations reveal how important the management of debris and its ideological effects are to local and national governments. Trash is political. And politics is an assemblage of the human and the non-human, the intentional and the accidental.
On Wednesday, November 13, 2019, 10:00 am, Marston Library L136, Dr. Dawdy will hold a workshop of the Imagineering the Technosphere group, titled Repurposing the Past for the Future with Digital Technologies. The past has a tenuous, often contentious, relationship with the future. We fragment and sequester the past, drawing memory from only those things we have at hand and rupturing continuities with the present by forgetting. Futures discounting exacerbates this myopic condition by playing on uncertainties to diminish the wisdom of looking too far ahead. How can digital technologies help bridge the past with the future? Examples from digital storytelling, augmented and virtual reality, and spatialized archives enable us to explore the potential for hetereotemporality, nonlinear histories, and the power of ruins and artifacts to experience other times and places. Workshop participants are invited to share their own efforts with digital technologies for repurposing the past for the future.
Job Board
The Wesleyan University Anthropology Department has a full-time, one-semester visiting position (with benefits) for spring 2020. The successful candidate would teach two undergraduate-level courses and assist in advising undergraduate theses. The topical and/or area focus of the courses is open, though courses in the anthropology of health and illness are of special interest. Applicants should send a cover letter, CV, work sample, and teaching statement, including brief descriptions of courses they might teach, to Elizabeth Traube, Chair, etraube@wesleyan.edu by December 1.
Enjoy your weekend!
Pete Collings
Associate Professor and Chair
Jessie Ball duPont-Magid Term Professor
Department of Anthropology
University of Florida