Issue 1: Summer 2017
Photo: Sarah Farmer photographed by Joshua Ives, June 2017.
Summer Field School
Gratiot's Grove Archaeological Field School
This summer was the inaugural season of the Gratiot's Grove Archaeological Field School in Gratiot, Wisconsin. Our own, Dr. Guido Pezzarossi, led a group of 10 graduate and undergraduate students in a three week excavation of what was once Gratiot's Grove, a 19th century led mining community in South Western Wisconsin. Photography Major and Anthropology Minor, Joshua Ives participated in the field school and documented field school life on and off the site. Some of his incredible photos are featured below. To check out more of Josh's photos and receive updates on the project check out our Facebook page!
If you are interested in getting in involved with the project or you are interested in joining the project in the coming field season please e-mail Dr. Guido Pezzarossi for more information!
Undergraduate News
Danielle Schaf
I am a junior at Syracuse University, triple majoring in Anthropology, Forensic Science, and Writing & Rhetoric. This last summer I was selected to be a US-UK Fulbright Commission Summer Institute Participant. I had the opportunity to travel to Durham University in Northern England, and stay for four weeks. During this time I studied archaeology and medieval history.
For the first two weeks of the program we trained in archaeological practicals, engaging in ceramic and pottery analysis, GIS, landscape archaeology, photogrammetry, 3D model making, osteoarchaeology, and DNA analysis. I worked with Roman ceramics from Binchester, and using my photogrammetry skills, I created a 3D Model of a Medieval Mandible (https://skfb.ly/6sqow), using our landscape archaeological and drone skills I made a 3D Model of the Durham Racecourse (https://skfb.ly/6sySn). Further, I worked with skeletal remains dating before 537 A.D., and performed a gel electrophoresis DNA test to confirm and determine the sex of ancient skeletons.
For the latter two weeks of the program, we entrenched ourselves in 5th-11th Century Northumbrian history. We began exploring the post-Roman era to the Anglo-Saxon period, to the Viking invasion, and the ecclesiastical rise. We examined 8th-Century manuscripts, learning a slim amount of Latin and paleography skills to attempt to translate. Additionally, we also examined Anglo-Norman Durham and architecture, and also studied Saint Bede and Saint Cuthbert and dissected the notions, ideologies, and beliefs of sainthood.
Though we spent most of our time in the classroom and lab, we traveled all around the UK to the Roman Emperor Hadrian’s Wall, the Iron-Age stone fort, Yeavering Bell, the Roman archaeological site Binchester, London, the 7th-Century Monastery at Lindisfarne, Bamburgh Castle, Edinburgh, and the 12th-Century Monastery Fountains Abbey.
I learned immensely about my discipline, my future, my research focuses, and myself. My time spent was well spent as a US-UK Fulbright Commission Summer Institute Participant, something that has certainly shaped me into a better scholar, academic, and individual.
If you are interested in applying for the US-UK Fulbright Commission Summer Institute: http://www.fulbright.org.uk/going-to-the-uk/uk-summer-institutes
Grace Gugerty
Grace is a junior at Syracuse University majoring in Anthropology with a minor in Medical Anthropology.
Anthropology at a Free Dental Clinic?
Amaus Medical Services is a free walk-in clinic located at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Downtown Syracuse. The volunteer-run clinic provides primary care health services as well as dental care for the uninsured and those in poverty with limited health care access. I am a part team of students from all levels: high school, undergraduate, graduate, and a medical student under the direction of Sandra Lane and Robert Rubenstein conducting an interview-based qualitative study with patients at the dental clinic on dental health and access care. A similar study, “Action Anthropology in a Free Clinic” (Lane et al 2017) was conducted previously with patients at the Amaus Clinic’s primary care office. Our team has drafted the IRB, reviewed literature, and composed a comprehensive interview that includes questions relating to oral care practices, access and barriers to dental care, risk factors for poor oral health, and life history of oral health issues. We conduct patient interviews at the clinic once a week, with an aim of approximately 60 interviews by completion of the study.
Dental care has been a major healthcare disparity among those living in poverty, as it is often excluded from primary healthcare services. The Affordable Care Act brought dental health care access to many for the first time. Recent Congressional debate on the Affordable Care Act, however, has suggested dental insurance will no longer be covered. Our study focuses on individual experience with this system and how poor oral health affects whole health, both physically and mentally. I find this project valuable to as an anthropology student because it employs action anthropology, a form of doing anthropological research developed by Sol Tax. Action anthropology forms a bridge between anthropologists and local communities by allowing community members the platform to voice their needs and subsequent anthropological research performed to address such concerns. As an undergraduate student, the chance to go into the Syracuse community and see how anthropology can be used beyond academia in a way that fosters societal change has been invaluable.
Graduate News
Terese Gagnon
Terese is a 3rd year doctoral student in cultural anthropology with a focus on environmental anthropology.
This summer I was in Burma/Myanmar and Northern Thailand engaging in language training conducting preliminary research for my dissertation project. My research as a whole looks at co-movements of Karen people and their plants across the sites of Karen State, Burma, refugee camps in Thailand and Syracuse, New York. It asks questions about people’s engagements with plants in each of these places and relative feelings of alienation and enchantment. I began my summer by participating in a Burmese language-training course in Yangon. From there I traveled to Chiang Mai, Thailand where I collaborated with members of the Payap University Peace Studies Program and local Karen environmental and social activists, while also studying Karen language. I spent time with these activists, learning about their collaborative research, Karen environmental perspectives, and the challenges currently facing rural Karen communities due the continued effects of a 70-year-long civil war (fought between Karen armed groups and the Burmese military) and, more recently, accelerated cases of land-grabbing, deforestation and the incursion of extractive industries and hydroelectric dams. Much of the research I conducted while in Mae Sot, Thailand, a town on the Burma/Thai border, and in Hpa-an, the capital of Karen State, involved spending time in markets and cafes asking people about their engagements and perspectives on food and plants especially in regard to sense of place and identity. Some interesting, if tentative, initial findings were the ways that food and plants—specifically the sharing of recipes and regional ingredients—may allow for coalition building across different groups and the construction not only of a “sense of home” in exile for displaced peoples, but motivation to work towards the political conditions for physical return.
Produce Market in Hpa-an, Karen State
Sean H. Reid
Sean H. Reid is a doctoral student in the anthropology department at Syracuse University. He specializes in African archaeology, maritime archaeology, and the archaeology of the Atlantic world.
My doctoral research project examines longue durée continuity, transformation, and rupture in settlement patterns, subsistence, and technology in the coast and forest hinterlands of the Western and Central Regions of Ghana. The primary temporal focus of this research is the past two millennia, encompassing the late Iron Age and period of the Atlantic trade. Through this research, I seek to understand the processes that unfolded during this dynamic period by examining and interpreting the archaeological landscape with methods that include remote sensing, archaeological pedestrian survey, diagnostic artifact analysis, and limited test excavation to identify and assess former settlement sites, activity areas, and evidence for specialization through time.
I spent ten months (September 2016-July 2017) in Ghana supported by a Fulbright U.S. Student fellowship collecting data for my dissertation. During the course of my archaeological survey I logged about 200 new archaeological sites and did test excavation at three sites I located: an iron smelting site, a stone tool production / modification site, and a hilltop settlement. These sites were selected for excavation because of the high probability they were used or occupied during the pre-Atlantic era (likely the first and early second millennium A.D.) We are still grappling with the chronology and material culture of this region, but the evidence we do have suggests striking social-political transformations during this early period.
Faculty News
Azra Hromadžić
Dr. Azra Hromadžić is cultural anthropologist with research interests in the anthropology of international policy in the context of state-making in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina. She is an associate professor of anthropology here at Syracuse University and is currently serving as the department's Undergraduate Director.
During numerous recent visits to my ethnographic field site in Bosnia and Herzegovina, I was struck by a discord: while the majority of studies of the Balkans (my own included) analyze this region through the ethnonational lens, the concerns of ordinary people reflect many other domains of struggle. The people I talked to in the northwestern Bosnian town of Bihać, for example, frequently complained about their poor health, the declining health of their family and friends, the crumbling medical and social care system—especially as it pertains to the elderly—and about the growing burden of care left in the wake of these challenges. As a result of these encounters, I realized that (elder) care was an important arena through which the state, family, citizenship, labor, bonds of intimacy, and notions of normal life were being talked about, lived, and imagined in Bosnia. Two years ago, I decided to apply for a Fulbright scholarship to study these transformations in order to understand how people and institutions care for those in need in this postwar and postsocialist context.
In 2017 I spent 7 months (January-August) on a Fulbright scholarship in Bosnia teaching and conducting ethnographic research on ageing, care and social work. I observed tender and complicated relations and regimes of care for the elderly at Vitalis—a small, privately-owned nursing home in Bihać. My second site was Bihać’s Center for Social Work, where underpaid and underappreciated social workers struggled to help those in need even when they had no budget to do so. What I concluded from this extensive research is that both the state and family in postwar and postsocialist Bosnia materialize as semi-absent: the state is bureaucratically and politically ubiquitous but biopolitically shrinking, and family is materially present but physically elsewhere, or physically present and materially incapable to provide care.
Toward the end of my stay in Bosnia, I also initiated a new research project. I did not plan on starting a new study, but as it often happens in the field, processes on the ground, especially controversies around the beautiful river Una that runs through the center of Bihać, were too important to people I worked with. These people were extremely concerned about, among other things, the “quality” of their water; ageing water infrastructure and sewer systems; and about numerous concessions given to foreign and local firms to build dams on numerous wild rivers in Bosnia, including Una. These concerns generated novel and hybrid types of political practices, environmental pedagogy, expert knowledge, and social imaginary which I hope to continue researching in the years to come.