In the Department of Anthropology and Geography, together, we imagine, solve, protect, discover, and understand. From youth outreach to ethnography, ecological forecasting to excavation, students and faculty share what it means to be human in the past and in the present.
Students in the course Geography of Global Health had a unique opportunity to study the global health lesson of the COVID-19 pandemic as it unfolded across the world in Spring 2020. Learning about inequalities, vulnerabilities, and human-environment relations that shape the disease dynamics, outbreaks,and incidence taught students to investigate the social and systemic interactions of the virus.
A cave site in hilly, northern Croatia may offer clues about the rituals and sacred spaces of the Neanderthals, an Ice Age human population. Anthropology researchers Mica Glantz, Michael Pante, and Connie Fellman are working to determine whether ritual, survival – or a serving of both – account for one of the world’s largest collection of Neandertal remains.
Geographers use a variety of technologies to investigate human-environment interactions: remote sensing data, satellite imagery, aerial photographs, lidar, GIS, and fieldwork. But they also engage collaboratively with communities to understand the impact of land-use and land-cover changes, all of which can assist with land policy and management decisions.
When a disaster threatens, how do people decide whether to stay or to evacuate? To rebuild or relocate? How to restore their lives? Prof. Kate Browne’s work with survivors of Hurricane Harvey explores the decisions people make using a novel “assemblage” technique.
From electronic art to silver mining in Bolivia, the German Enlightenment to Congressional productivity, our faculty are able to extend their research based on donor support from Great Conversations.
For the past 10 years, assistant professor of anthropology Michael Pante has collaborated with other scientists, students, and the local Maasai population to study early human eating behavior (1.7M years ago) in Olduvai Gorge in northern Tanzania as part of the Olduvai Geochronology and Archaeology Project.
