Faculty

Joshua T. Schnell

Joshua Schnell is a biological anthropologist and anthropological archaeologist specializing in the bio archaeology of the Maya region. His current work emphasizes human agency in the study of health, healing, and medicine in the past, calling attention to people’s efforts to shape their appearance, care for their bodies, and combat and treat illnesses and injuries. Before joining the faculty at Pitt, he was a Pre-Columbian Studies Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington, DC and has additionally held fellowships at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, RI and the National Science Foundation. At Pitt, he runs the Imaging and Microscopy in Anthropology Group Lab (IMAG Lab) and welcomes undergraduate and graduate student research involvement in his lab and field endeavors. His current fieldwork is based in Chiapas, Mexico but he has previously conducted field work across the Maya region - in Belize, Guatemala, and Mexico at a variety of Classic and Pre classic sites, including large, dynastic civic-ceremonial urban centers, small frontier and subsidiary sites, and mortuary rock shelters and caves. He is also working on a book project examining dental aesthetics, medical dentistry, and oral care practices among the ancient Maya
 

Degrees and Education

PhD, Brown University

Research Description

In broadest strokes, I am interested in how the body was understood, maintained, and altered - both during life and after death - in the archaeological past. My interests primarily lie in bioarchaeological approaches to the study of medicine and healing in the past, including (1) the treatment of the dis-eased body via medical and therapeutic practices, (2) the maintenance of bodily health via diet, hygienic practices, and routine care, and (3) the upkeep of the aesthetic or “crafted” body and its intersection with health.

My current project examines evidence for oral care, dental hygiene, and aesthetic expression of the mouth in the Maya world. The human dentition provides a unique opportunity to examine both quotidian and self-directed forms of care (such as toothbrushing and other cleansing practices)  and practices reflecting specialized knowledge such as therapeutic and herbal treatments, including oral surgery and tooth extractions. Understanding how people cared for their mouths within their specific cultural context, and how those practices might intersect with broader cultural values such as hygiene, sociality, aesthetics, and even morality can tremendously enhance our study of health and disease in the past. Through this work, I am also working with colleagues in paleoethnobotany, biomolecular anthropology, and dental science to advance a holistic model for the study of the mouth in the archaeological past. My work is fundamentally biocultural and interdisciplinary and I am committed to exploring and developing new, innovative methodologies and approaches for advancing the study of health and disease in the past. I believe this work should always be culturally-grounded, which is why I incorporate iconography, visual culture, ethnohistory, and ethnography in my research.

I have additional research interests in archaeological representation in gaming, collecting practices and research in/of collections,  and the cultural modification of the antemortem and postmortem body, including dress and ornamentation, body modification practices, mortuary practices, and the postmortem lives of human remains (especially objects crafted from human bone).

Courses

  • Human Variation
  • The Decorated Body: Cultural Expression and the Human Body

Publications

Scherer, Andrew K., Ricardo Rodas, Joshua T. Schnell, Mónica Urquizú, and Omar Alcover Firpi. 2024. “The Man of Macabilero: An Osteobiography of Perseverance.” In Mesoamerican Osteobiographies: Revealing the Lives and Deaths of Ancient Individuals, edited by Gabriel Wrobel and Andrea Cucina. University Press of Florida, Gainesville.

Watson, Sarah E., Joshua T. Schnell, Shanti Morell-Hart, Andrew K. Scherer, and Lydie Dussol. 2023. “Healthcare in the Marketplace: Exploring Maya Medicinal Plants and Practices at Piedras Negras, Guatemala.” Ancient Mesoamerica, 34(2), 383-406. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956536122000037

Scherer, Andrew K., and Joshua T. Schnell. 2022. “Maya Bioarchaeology.” In The Routledge Handbook of Mesoamerican Bioarchaeology, edited by Vera Tiesler, pp. 168-180. Routledge, London.

Hernandez-Bolio, Gloria I., Patricia Quintana, Marco Ramírez-Salomon, Elma Vega-Lizama, Michele Morgan, Joshua T. Schnell, Andrew Scherer, and Vera Tiesler. 2022. “Organic Compositional Analysis of Ancient Maya Tooth Sealants and Fillings.” Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, 43, 103435. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2022.103435

Scherer, Andrew K., Charles Golden, Stephen Houston, Mallory Matsumoto, Omar A. Alcover Firpi, Whittaker Schroder, Alejandra Roche Recinos, Socorro Jiménez Álvarez, Mónica Urquizú, Griselda Robles Pérez, Joshua T. Schnell, and Zachary X. Hruby. 2022. “Chronology and the Evidence for War in the Classic Maya Kingdom of Piedras Negras.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 66, 101408. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2022.101408

Schnell, Joshua T., and Andrew K. Scherer. 2021. “Classic Maya Dental Interventions: Evidence for Tooth Extractions at Piedras Negras, Guatemala.”  Bioarchaeology International, 5, 47-67. https://doi.org/10.5744/bi.2021.1001

Golden, Charles, Andrew K. Scherer, Whittaker Schroder, Timothy Murtha, Shanti Morell-Hart, Juan Carlos Fernandez Diaz, Socorro del Pilar Jiménez Álvarez, Omar Alcover Firpi, Mark Agostini, Alexandra Bazarsky, Morgan Clark, George Van Kollias III, Mallory Matsumoto, Alejandra Roche Recinos, Joshua Schnell, and Bethany Whitlock. 2021. “Airborne Lidar Survey, Density-Based Clustering, and Ancient Maya Settlement in the Upper Usumacinta River Region of Mexico and Guatemala.” Remote Sensing, 13, 4019. https://doi.org/10.3390/rs13204109 

Stephanie V. Love

Stephanie V. Love received a Ph.D. in linguistic anthropology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) in 2022. From 2022-23, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, participating in the interdisciplinary seminar “Repairing the Past.” Her first book project, “Streets of Grievance: Everyday Poetics and Postcolonial Politics in Urban Algeria,” explores the complex ways that violent pasts (both colonial and postcolonial) get reanimated in ordinary urban speech, landscapes, and memory practices. It asks: How can a people repair the past—characterized by 132 years of violent settler colonialism and six decades of postcolonial civil strife—when the past is not dead? This project examines the “afterlives” of violence through the social work of anticolonial martyrs, abandoned cemeteries, colonial placenames that will not die, and the vital presence of other sites of ‘dead’ colonialism in contemporary Algerian society. This lens sheds light on how contemporary city dwellers speak about the past to make claims on the future and how they talk to each other across entrenched, seemingly unbridgeable political divides. The book argues that everyday urban poetics is central to this emergent social action. It allows people to make novel connections by playing with urban forms in their ordinary speech, shaping collective sentiments with political potential. Dr. Love is also dedicated to rethinking higher education in the post-pandemic world and has coordinated several pedagogical initiatives at CUNY, including the STEM Pedagogy Institute, Carnegie Educational Technology Fellowship, and the Heritage Arabic eBook project at the Center for Integrated Language Communities.

Degrees and Education

Ph.D. Anthropology, Linguistic and Cultural The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY), New York, NY

Research Description

Urban anthropology, postcolonialism, semiotics, history/memory, materiality, migration, language politics, poetics, spatiotemporal imaginaries (chronotopes), the dead/ afterlives, revolution, the Middle East and North Africa, exile, the Mediterranean

Publications

Love, Stephanie V. 2023. Echoes of ‘Dead’ Colonialism: The Voices and Materiality of a (Post)colonial Algeria­n Newspaper. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. 33(1): 72-91. https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.12392

Love, Stephanie V. 2021. The Poetics of Grievance: Taxi-drivers, Vernacular Placenames, and the Paradoxes of Postcoloniality in Oran, Algeria. City & Society 33(3): 422-443.  https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ciso.12412

Love, Stephanie V. 2021. “Are we not of interest to each other?” A pedagogy of presence during the COVID-19 pandemic. Anthropology Now! 13(2): 65-76. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19428200.2021.1973330

Love, Stephanie V. & L. Wu. 2020. Are We in the Same Boat? Ethnographic Lessons of Sheltering in Place from International Seafarers and Algerian Harraga in the Age of Global  Pandemic. Anthropology Now! April 2020 issue. https://anthronow.com/press-watch/are-we-in-the-same-boat-ethnographic-lessons-of-sheltering-in-place-from-international-seafarers-and-algerian-harraga-in-the-age-of-global-pandemic

Love, Stephanie V. 2019. Decolonizing the Church/Decolonizing Language: Postcolonial Christianity, Language Ideologies, and the Morality of Teaching Vernacular Arabic (Darija) in Algeria. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education,18(1): 25-38. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15348458.2019.1575740

Love, Stephanie V. 2016. ‘Broken Arabic’ and Ideologies of Completeness: Contextualizing the Category of ‘Native’ and ‘Heritage’ Speaker in the University Arabic Classroom. Bellaterra Journal of Teaching and Learning Language and Literature, 9(2): 78-93. https://raco.cat/index.php/Bellaterra/article/view/310698 

Love, Stephanie V. 2016. An Educated Identity: The School as a Modernist Chronotope in Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels. In G. R. Bullaro and S. Love (eds.), The Works of Elena Ferrante: Reconfiguring the Margins (pp. 71-97). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Bullaro, Grace R. & Stephanie V. Love. 2016. Beyond the Margins: Ferrante Fever and Italian Female Writing. In G. R. Bullaro and S. Love (eds.), The Works of Elena Ferrante: Reconfiguring the Margins (pp. 1-12). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9781137590626

Bullaro, Grace R. & Stephanie V. Love 2016. The Works of Elena Ferrante: Reconfiguring the Margins. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9781137590626

Love, Stephanie V. & Dora Kotai. 2015. The Invisible Learners in the Classroom: Macro-Level Politics and Micro-Level Experiences of LESLLA in Italy. In M. Santos & A. Whiteside, Proceedings from the 9th annual LESLLA (low educated second language and literacy acquisition) symposium. City College of San Francisco.

Love, Stephanie V. 2014. Mother Tongue: Identity in the Translingual and Transnational Narratives of Carmine Abate and Cristina Ali Farah. In G. R. Bullaro & E. Banelli (Eds.), Shifting and Shaping a National Identity in a Pluricultural Society: Transnational Writers in Italy Today (pp. 107-127). Leicester, UK: Troubador Italian Studies Series. https://www.amazon.com/Shifting-Shaping-National-Identity-Pluriculturalism/dp/1783063785

Love, Stephanie V. 2014. Language Testing, ‘Integration’ and Subtractive Multilingualism in Italy: Challenges for Adult Immigrant Second Language and Literacy Education. Current Issues in Language Planning, 15(3/4). Special issue. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14664208.2014.947017

Love, Stephanie V. & Manka Varghese. 2012. The Historical and Contemporary Role of Race, Language, and Schooling in Italy’s Immigrant Policies: Public Discourses and Pedagogies. International Journal of Multicultural Education, 14(2). Special Issue: Challenging Anti-Immigration Discourses in School and Community Contexts. (with M. Varghese). https://ijme-journal.org/index.php/ijme/article/view/491

Dela Kuma

Dela Kuma is an anthropological archaeologist who specializes in the archaeology of global encounters in Atlantic-era West Africa. Her current research, the archaeology of ‘legitimate’ trade, examines broad transformations in local taste practices and everyday life during the 19th-century Afro-European trade in the hinterlands of southeastern Ghana. She specializes in the use of archaeometry and archaeobotanical tools to answer archaeological questions concerning foodways, trade, and global entanglements. Dela has also worked on archaeological projects in Nigeria, Portugal, Italy, Israel, and Russia.

Region of Study

West Africa, Ghana

Topics

Archaeology, daily life, foodways, global encounters, local taste

Degrees and Education

PhD, Northwestern University

Research Description

I am broadly interested in questions about how local communities negotiate broader-scale developments at the intimate levels of the household and communities. I am specifically interested in how local people leverage sociocultural practices such as local conceptualization of taste to navigate through global entanglements and make consumption choices, and how these decisions manifest materially in the archaeological records.

In the short term, I am analyzing archaeobotanical remains recovered from Amedeka to understand changes in the practices of food preparations and consumption at the turn of the 19th century when Amedeka became entangled in the ‘legitimate’ trade. Preliminary analyses show well-preserved macrobotanical remains that suggest increased processing of palm oil which could be connected to changes in ceramic forms and shapes.

Daily Life and Domestic Economies in Hinterland Regions of Ghana

This long-term community-based collaborative archaeological research examines how domestic economies of hinterland regions in Ghana responded to the commercial developments in the Atlantic world from the 16th to 20th centuries, a period that encompasses the socioeconomic integration of African economies into the Atlantic trade through to the transitions into the so-called legitimate economies and into formal colonial regimes. I will start this work by expanding excavations at Amedeka and including archaeological data from a broad regional catchment area in the southern region of Ghana. Methodologically, this work will expand the Neutron Activation Analysis database that we have of the southern region combined with other interdisciplinary approaches, to understand how local people negotiated changes in the production, consumption, and exchange patterns at the microlevel of households and community levels.

Jennifer Muller

Jennifer Muller (PhD, University at Buffalo 2006) is a historical bioarchaeologist whose research explores the biological consequences of discrimination‐based inequities in 19th- and 20th-century African diasporic populations and the institutionalized poor. Her research, which integrates archaeological, archival, ethnographic, and skeletal data, aims to disrupt hegemonic narratives of the poor and the marginalized in the past. Through the investigation of the use of bodies in medical and anthropological training, her scholarship also examines how people who are discriminated against in life may also experience the negative consequences of inequity in death. Prior to coming to the University of Pittsburgh, she held appointments with the Department of Anthropology at Ithaca College, the City University of New York, and the W. Montague Cobb Laboratory at Howard University.

Degrees and Education

PhD, University of Buffalo, 2006

Research Description

Much of Jennifer Muller’s research has included bioarchaeological analysis of those interred in poorhouse cemeteries and US anatomical collections. Her research on the Monroe County Poorhouse and the W. Montague Cobb Skeletal Collection focused on the skeletal evidence of trauma and its connections to discrimination and racism in occupational opportunity. In recent years, she has explored trauma and disease in the past and its association with the social dis-abling of individuals with perceived impairments. Beginning in 2013, she has contributed to the Erie County Poorhouse Bioarchaeology Project (Buffalo, NY) through the analysis of the 67 child and infant remains from an excavated portion of the poorhouse. Many of these skeletal remains present with evidence of severe pathology. In- depth research of New York State historical documents reveals that poorhouse children (between 2 and 16 years of age) with perceived physical and mental impairments were considered deviant and unworthy of familial care or transference to orphanages. This research provides insight into the role of socially ascribed disability as a determinant of historical social welfare worthiness. This not only contributes to historical narratives but has direct relevance to our understanding of social welfare policy and practice today.

Critical to Jennifer Muller’s applied and engaged approach is the incorporation of descendant communities in research design, implementation, and outreach/education. She has also been involved in several projects aimed at local and descendant community partnership and advocacy for the preservation of sacred spaces and heritage management.

 

 

Courses

0620 Biocultural Anthropology

0680 Introduction to Biological Anthropology

0681 Introduction to Human Evolution
1600 Human Evolution and Variation

1750 Inequity & the Body

1805 Bioarchaeology

 

Recent Publications
 

Byrnes JF and Muller JL. 2022. A Child Left Behind: Malnutrition and Chronic Illness of a Child from the Erie  County Poorhouse Cemetery. International Journal of Osteoarchaeology. doi: 10.1002/oa.3130.

Muller JL. 2021. A Bioarchaeology of Inequality: Lessons from American Institutionalized and Anatomical Skeletal Assemblages. In: O. Cerasuolo (Ed.) Inequality in Antiquity. Buffalo, NY: State University of New York Press.

Muller JL., Byrnes, JF. and Ingleman, DA. 2020. The Erie County Poorhouse (1828–1926) as a Heterotopia: A Bioarchaeological Perspective. In: LA Tremblay and S Reedy (Eds.) The Bioarchaeology of Structural Violence: A Theoretical Framework for Industrial Era Inequality. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.

Muller JL. 2020. Reflecting on a More Inclusive Historical Bioarchaeology. Journal of Historical Archaeology 54(1):202-211.

Muller JL. and Butler MS. 2018. At the Intersections of Race, Poverty, Gender, and Science: A Museum Mortuary for Twentieth Century Fetuses and Infants. In: PK Stone (Ed), Bioarchaeological Analyses and Bodies: New Ways of Knowing Anatomical and Archaeological Skeletal Collections. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.

Byrnes JF and Muller JL. (Eds) 2017. Bioarchaeology of Impairment and Disability: Theoretical, Ethnohistorical, and Methodological Perspectives. Part of the series “Bioarchaeology and Social Theory” edited by Debra Martin. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.

Byrnes JF and Muller JL. 2017. Mind the Gap: Bridging Disability Studies and Bioarchaeology – An Introduction. In: JF Byrnes and JL Muller (Eds) Bioarchaeology of Impairment and Disability: Theoretical, Ethnohistorical, and Methodological Perspectives. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.

Muller JL. 2017. Rendered Unfit: ‘Defective’ Children in the Erie County Poorhouse. In: JF Byrnes and JL Muller (Eds) Bioarchaeology of Impairment and Disability: Theoretical, Ethnohistorical, and Methodological Perspectives. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.

Muller JL, Pearlstein K, and de la Cova C. 2016. Dissection and documented skeletal collections: legal embodiment of inequality. In: KC Nystrom (ed) The Bioarchaeology of Autopsy and Dissection in the United States. Bioarchaeology and Social Theory series, Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.

Watkins RJ and Muller JL. 2015. Repositioning the Cobb Human Archive: the merger of a skeletal collection and its texts. American Journal of Human Biology 27(1):41-50.

Steven Goldstein

Steven Goldstein (PhD Washington University in Saint Louis, 2017) is an anthropological archaeologist who studies long-term relationships between food systems, mobility, climate change, and technology over the last 12,000 years in eastern and southeastern Africa. After completing his PhD he undertook a 2 year post-doctoral position at the Max Planck Institute for Human History in Jena, Germany followed by a 3 year position as a Research Group Leader at the same institute before coming to Pittsburgh.

He has been directing community-based field projects in Kenya since 2014 and Zambia since 2017 that assess questions related to the spread of mobile pastoralism, origins of agriculture, and hunter-gatherer responses to environmental stress. To address these questions, he applies expertise in lithic technological studies, landscape archaeology, GIS, and geoarchaeological methods. His current field research largely centers on assessing how conditions of food security were impacted by the expansion of African states and beginnings of European colonialism over the last few hundred years. He is also engaged in a book project examining the social and economic transformations in herder lifeways across the last 4000 years in eastern Africa.

Degrees and Education

Washington University in Saint Louis

Research Description

Kakapel Archaeological Project: This collaborative project between the Max Planck Institute and the National Museums of Kenya investigates a 12,000 year record of demographic, economic, and climatic change at Kakapel Rockshelter, western Kenya. Excavations directed by Dr. Goldstein have revealed the largest record of plant food use in the region, including the adoption of diverse crops that arrived during migrations into the Lake Victoria Basin from different parts of the African continent. Coupled with archaeogenetic and paleoclimatic analyses, this project is building a unique perspective on when and how agricultural strategies developed in eastern Africa.

Origins of Agriculture in Zambia: Working with partners at the University of Zambia and Livingstone Museum, this project has involved excavations at several Early and Late Iron Age sites across Central and southern Zambia.  The goals of the project are to establish a high-resolution chronology for the arrival, spread, and intensification of lifeways based on mobile herding and plant agriculture.

Small-scale responses to large-scale climate change at Lothagam-Lokam: This project co-led by Dr. Goldstein, Dr. Elizabeth  Hildebrand (SUNY-Stony Brook), and Dr. Elizabeth Sawchuk (Cleveland Museum of Natural History) investigates how small-scale fisher-hunter-gatherer communities along the Lake Turkana Basin of northern Kenya responded to Climate change between c. 12000-5000 years ago. Paleoclimatic data reveals a complex pattern of regional rainfall change and local environmental shifts impacted the livelihoods of people living in the area. Archaeological analysis suggests people responded to local stresses through changes in the organization of group mobility, and to lasting aridification through technological innovation and intensification. These perspectives are providing new insights into how small-scale communities in the past successfully managed climatic crises.

Prehistoric Eastern African Quarry Survey (PEAQS): The PEAQS project seeks to identify and document patterns of lithic raw material access across eastern Africa. It is particularly focused on the diversity in stone quarrying strategies, core preparation strategies, and lithic reduction techniques applied at quarries and mines. By identifying these central nodes in long-distance regional exchange and interaction networks, we hope to better understand the relationship between stone-tool using peoples, mobility and land-use, trade networks, and economic organization. So far, research has included examination of obsidian quarries on Mt. Eburru and the Lake Naivasha Basin in Central Kenya.  

 

Courses

TBA

 

Publications

2022 Goldstein, S.T., Shipton, C., Miller, J., Ndiema, E., Boivin, N., Petraglia, M.  “Technological organization through the terminal Pleistocene and Holocene in eastern Africa’s coastal forests: Implications for understanding human-environment interactions.” Quaternary Science Reviews 280:107390. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2022.107390

2022 Goldstein, S.T., Farr, J., Kayuni, M., Katongo, M., Fernandes, R., Janzen, A., Markham, B., Crowther, A., & Boivin, N. “Excavations at the Iron Age village site of Fibobe II, Central Zambia.” Journal of African Archaeology. https://doi.org/10.1163/21915784-bja10012

2021 Mueller, N.G., Goldstein, S.T., Odeny, D., & Boivin, N. “Variability and preservation biases in the archaeobotanical record of Eleusine coracana (finger millet): Evidence from Iron Age Kenya.” Vegetation History and Archaeobotany. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00334-021-00853-y

2021 Goldstein, S.T., Crowther, A., Henry, E.R., Katongo, M., Janzen, A., Farr, J., Picin, A., Le Moyne, C., Boivin, N. “Revisiting Kalundu Mound, Zambia: Implications for the timing of social and subsistence transitions in Iron Age southern Africa.” African Archaeological Review 38(4): 625-655. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10437-021-09440-y

2021 Storozum, M., Goldstein, S.T., Conterras, D.A., Gidna, A., Mabulla, A., Grillo, K., & Prendergast, M.E. “Legacies of ancient herder settlement: soil development and landscape evolution on the Mbulu Plateau, Tanzania.” Catena 204:105376.

2021 Janzen, A., Richter, K.K., Brown, S., Mwebi, O., Gatwiri, F., Katongo, M., Goldstein, S.T., Douka, K., Bovin, N. “Distinguishing African bovids using Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS).” PLoS1 16 (5), e0251061.

2021 Goldstein, S.T. “Lithic technological organization of the “Elmenteitan” in southern Kenya: Implications for mobility and climatic resilience.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 61: 101259. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2020.101259.

2021 Bleasdale, M., Richter, K., Janzen, A., Brown, S., Scott, A., Zech, J., Wilkin, S., Wang, K., Schiffels, S., Desideri, J., Besse, M., Ndiema, E., Ogola, C., Manthi, F., Zahir, M., Petraglia, M., Trachsel, C., Nanni, P., Grossman, J., Hendy, J., Crowther, A., Roberts, P., Goldstein, S., Boivin, N. “Ancient proteins provide direct evidence of dairy consumption in eastern Africa.” Nature Communications 12(632).  https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-20682-3.

2020 Scerri, E., Kuhnert, D., Blinkhorn, J., Groucutt, H., Roberts, P., Zerboni, A., Orijemie, A., Barton, H., Candy, I., Goldstein, S., Hawks, J., N’Dah, D., Niang, K., Nicoll, K., Petraglia, M., & Vella, N. “Field based sciences must transform in response to COVID-19.” Nature Ecology & Evolution.

2020 Wang, K.*, Goldstein, S.T.*., Bleasdale, M.,  Clist, B., Bostoen, K.,  Bakwa-Lufu, P., Buck, L. T., Crowther, A.,  Dème, A., McIntosh,  R., Mercador Florin, J., Ogola, C., Power, R., Sawchuk, E., Willmsen, E., Petraglia, M., Ndiema, E., Manthi, F. K.., Krause, J., Roberts, P.,  Boivin, N., Schiffels, S. “Ancient genomes reveal complex patterns of population movement, interaction and integration in sub-Saharan Africa.” Science Advances 6(24). *Co-Corresponding authors

2020 D’errico, F., Shipton, C., Pitarch, A., Le Vraux, E., Goldstein, S., Boivin, N., Ndiema, E., Petraglia, M. “Trajectories of Middle to Later Stone Age cultural innovation in eastern Africa: the case of Panga ya Saidi, Kenya.” Journal of Human Evolution 141: 102737.

2019 Goldstein, S.T. “Lithic technology of the earliest herders at Lake Turkana, northern Kenya.” Antiquity 93 (372): 1495-1514

2019 Stephens, L., Fuller, D., Boivin, N., Rick, T….Goldstein, S (54th of 120)….Ellis, E.C. “Archaeological assessment reveals Earth’s early transformation through land use.” Science 365(6456): 897-902.

2019 Goldstein, S.T. “Infrastructures of pre-colonial food-security in eastern Africa,” In A. Logan & M. Shoeman (Eds) Useable Pasts Forum: Critically Engaging Food Security, African Archaeological Review. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10437-019-09347-9

2019 Goldstein, S.T. “The lithic assemblage from Sugenya: A Pastoral Neolithic site of the Elmenteitan    group in southwestern Kenya.”  Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa 54: 4-32.

2019 Goldstein, S.T. “Knowledge transmission through the lens of lithic production: A case study from the Pastoral Neolithic of southern Kenya.”  Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 26: 679-713.

2019 Capriles, J., Albarracin-Jordan, J., Lombardo, U.,Osorio, D., Maley, B., Goldstein, S.T., Herrera, K.A., Glascock, M.D., Domic, A., Veit, H., & Santoro, C.M. “Adaptation to High Altitude Ecosystems, and the Late Pleistocene Hunter-Gatherers of the Bolivian Andes.” Revista Textos Anthopológicos 20(9) :9-32.

2018  Marshall, F.B., Reid, R.E.B., Goldstein, S.T., Storozum, M., Wreschnig, A., Hu, L., Kiura, P., Shahack-Gross, R., & S.H. Ambrose.  “Ancient herders enriched and restructured African grasslands.” Nature 561: 387-390.

2018 Goldstein, S., Hildebrand, E., Storozum, M., Sawchuk, E., Lewis, J., Ngugi, C. & L. Robbins. “New archaeological investigations at the Lothagam harpoon site at Lake Turkana, Kenya.” Antiquity 91(360).

2018  Hildebrand, E., Grillo, K., E. Sawchuk, E., Pfeiffer, S., Conyers, L., Goldstein, S.,Hill, A.C., Janzen, A., Klehm, C., Helper, M., Kiura, P., Ndiema, E., Ngugi, C., Shea, J.J., and H. Wang.  “A monumental cemetery built by eastern Africa’s earliest herders near Lake Turkana, Kenya.”  Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 115 (36): 8942-8947.

2018 Sawchuk, E., Goldstein, S., Grillo, K., & E. Hildebrand. “Cemetery construction and the spread of pastoralism in eastern Africa.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 51: 187-205.

2018 Goldstein, S.T. “Picking up the pieces: Reconstructing lithic production strategies at a Late Holocene obsidian quarry in southern Kenya.” Journal of Field Archaeology 43(2): 85-101.

2018 Capriles, J., Albarracin-Jordan, J., Bird, D., Goldstein, S., Jarpa, G., Maldonado, C. & C. Santoro.  “Mobility, subsistence, and technological strategies of early Holocene hunter-gatherers in the Bolivian Altiplano.” Quaternary International 473b: 190-205.

2018 Grillo, K., Prendergast, M., Contreras, D., Fitton, T., Gidna, A., Goldstein, S., Knisley, M., Langley, M. & A. Mabulla. “Pastoral Neolithic Settlement at Luxmanda, Tanzania.”  Journal of Field Archaeology 32(2): 102-120.

2017 Goldstein, S.T. and J.M. Munyiri. The Elmenteitan Obsidian Quarry (GsJj50): “New perspectives on obsidian access and exchange during the Pastoral Neolithic of southern Kenya.” African Archaeological Review 34(1): 43-73.

2017 Frahm, E., Goldstein, S.T., & C.A. Tryon. „Forager-fisher and pastoralist interactions along the Lake Victoria shores, Kenya: Perspectives from portable XRF of obsidian artifacts from Kansyore rock shelters.” Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 11: 717-742.

2016 Goldstein, S.T. and C.M. Shaffer. “Experimental and archaeological investigations of geometric microlith function among Mid-to-Late Holocene herders in southwestern Kenya.” Journal of Archaeological and Anthropological Science 9(8): 1767-1788.

2016 Capriles J., Jordan, J., Lombardo, U., Osorio, D., Herrera, K., Maley, B., Goldstein, S.T., Domic, A. I., Glascock, M.D., Veit, H. & C. Santoro. “High-altitude adaptation and late Pleistocene foraging in the Bolivian Andes.” Journal of Archaeological Sciences: Reports 6: 46-474.

2014 Goldstein, S.T. “Quantifying endscraper reduction in the context of obsidian exchange among early pastoralists in southwestern Kenya.” Lithic Technology 39: 3-19.

Darlène Dubuisson

Darlène Dubuisson received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in October 2020. Her research interests and teaching span political and legal anthropology, activist and engaged anthropology, Black feminist anthropology, Black intellectual histories, migration, transnational studies, and speculative fiction and visual culture. Her work weaves analyses of Black radicalism, feminism, social and political movements, imagination, migration and diaspora, and crises and futures. Her primary geographic focus is the Caribbean and Latin America.

She also collaborates with Shannon Gleeson, Kate Griffith, and Patricia Campos-Medina (Cornell University) on a research project examining the effects of temporary immigration status and race on worker legal mobilization in the New York City metropolitan area.
 

Degrees and Education

Columbia University

Research Description

Darlène Dubuisson’s forthcoming book, Reclaiming Haiti’s Futures: Returned Intellectuals, Placemaking, and Radical Imagination, is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Port-au-Prince between 2013 and 2018. Haiti was once a beacon of Black liberatory futures, but now is often depicted as a place with no future where emigration is the only way out for most of its population. Reclaiming Haiti's Futures tells a different story. It is a story about two generations of Haitian scholars who returned home after particular crises to partake in social change. The first generation called "jenerasyon 86", were intellectuals who fled Haiti during the Duvalier dictatorship (1957-1986).They returned after the regime fell to participate in the democratic transition through their political leadership and activism. The younger generation, dubbed the "jenn doktè," returned after the 2010 earthquake to partake in national reconstruction through public higher education reform. An ethnography of the future, the book explores how these returned scholars resisted coloniality's fractures and displacements by working toward and creating inhabitability or future-oriented places of belonging through improvisation, rasanblaj (assembly), and radical imagination. By centering on Haiti and the Caribbean, the book offers insights not just into the Haitian experience but also into how fractures have come to typify more aspects of life globally and what we might do about it.

Dr. Dubuisson's current research project examines how black transit migrants in Latin America create futures amid “anti-black immigration governmentality.” It also looks at how refugee and migrant rights organizations challenge anti-black racism and xenophobia in national contexts where the official discourse denies structural racism and/or the existence of a local Black population. This project will expand scholarship on Black geographies, global antiblackness, Black futurity, and new immigration control mechanisms. 

Courses

Anthropology of Crises and Futures 

Anthropology of Crises and Futures (Black Futures in the Anthropocene) reviews theories and approaches in studies of temporality, crises, and futures. We read texts in anthropology, cultural studies, feminist studies, and SF (science/speculative fiction), which examine the relationship between temporality, crises, and imagining/enacting better futures. Specifically, we put ethnographies of crises and disasters in conversation with SF within Afrofuturism and Afro-pessimism frameworks. This course’s central goal is to challenge students 1) to integrate various approaches to produce innovative questions about current and impending issues and 2) to interrogate their relationship to time and temporarily. Students are also encouraged craft anthropologically grounded audio, material, or visual speculative projects that seriously engage Black and Indigenous theorists.  

Black Feminist Ethnographies

The undergraduate seminar finds grounding in Black feminist praxis, which calls for integrating theory and practice toward dismantling intersecting systems of oppression. Specifically, Black feminist praxis seeks to “illuminate the experiences of [Black] women and theorize from the materiality of their lives to broader issues of political economy, family, representation, and transformation” (Mullings 1997, xi). Throughout the course, students will read ethnographies and watch ethnographic films by Black feminist anthropologists, as well as “try on” the methods outlined in these written and visual texts. The seminar will also show students how to employ Black feminist ethnography in their own research. This course will fulfill the methods requirement for anthropology majors.

Theorizing from Ex-Centric Sites: Graduate Seminar in Decolonial Anthropology

In a recent essay, anthropologist Faye Harrison (2016, 170) calls on anthropologists to theorize from "ex-centric sites"—"Southern" locations, "particularly the peripheral zones where critical intellectual trajectories have been sustained despite trends toward erasure." Taking up Harrison's call, this advanced graduate seminar engages decolonial theories advanced by scholars from Southern locations or peripheralized social groups. We will critically engage the works of scholars like Anibal Quijano, Amie Césaire, Christina Sharpe, David Scott, Faye Harrison, Franz Fanon, Jean Casimir, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Walter D. Mignolo, Catherine E. Walsh, Yanick Lahens, Valentine Y. Mudimbe, Ramón Grosfoguel, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, and others. We will also explore how these scholars' ideas and methods may inform how we engage our research praxis.

Publications

Dubuisson, D. 2024, Reclaiming Haiti's Futures: Returned Intellectuals, Placemaking, and Radical Imagination. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Dubuisson, D., Campos-Medina, P., Gleeson, S. and Griffith, K. L., (2023). Centering Race in Studies of Low-Wage Immigrant Labor. Annual Review of Law and Social Science 19 (1): 109-129. 

Dubuisson, D. (2023), “There Is a Real Generational Problem in This Country”: Haitian Intellectual Exile and Academic Diaspora Returns. Transforming Anthropology, 31(1): 3-14.

Dubuisson, D. (2022). The Haitian zombie motif: against the banality of antiblack violence. Journal of Visual Culture 21(2), 255–276.

Dubuisson, D. (2022), Ethnography In-Sight and Sound: Rasanblaj and the Poetics of Creole Orality. The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 27: 220-226.

Dubuisson, D. and Schuller, M. (2022), Beyond poto mitan: Challenging the “Strong Black Woman” archetype and allowing space for tenderness. Feminist Anthropology, 3: 60-74.

Dubuisson, D. (2022), The (State) University of Haiti: Toward a Place-Based Understanding of Kriz. PoLAR, 45: 8-25.

Dubuisson, D. (2022), "Haiti: Black Utopia." Hot Spots, Fieldsights, May 3. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/haiti-black-utopia.

Dubuisson, D. (2020/21), "We Know How to Work Together": Konbit, Protest, and the Rejection of INGO Bureaucratic Dominance. Journal of Haitian Studies 26 (2): 53-80.

Claire Ebert

Claire Ebert is an environmental archaeologist interested in the complex dynamics between people and their local ecologies throughout the Holocene in Mesoamerica. Based on field work in western Belize, she examines the emergence of complexity among the earliest Maya agricultural communities and the fluctuating environmental and climatic contexts in which they appeared. She is a co-director of the Belize Valley Archaeological Reconnaissance (BVAR) Project and offers graduate and undergraduate student research opportunities in the field in Belize and in the Tropical Paleoecology and Isotope Geochemistry Lab in the Department of Anthropology at Pitt. Her current projects based in the Maya region include exploring relationships between the environmental and subsistence practices of early Maya farmers, human-animal relationships in ancestral Maya communities, lidar remote sensing analyses and survey of Maya polities in western Belize, and pottery and obsidian geochemical sourcing analyses. Other projects include meta-analyses of human and animal isotopic data to address significant questions about the origins of agriculture, urbanism, and movement and migration in Mesoamerica, the Caribbean, and Central America.

Prospective Students

I will not be accepting new students for AY 25-26.

Current PhD students working in the lab apply environmental archaeology, human ecology, and/or stable isotope analysis to research questions within Mesoamerican archaeology. Students are also welcome to design studies related to ongoing projects in the lab, focusing on questions about environmental change, diet, and commensal relationships between people, plants, and/or other animals in Mesoamerica or elsewhere in the ancient world.

 

Courses

  • Mesoamerica Before Cortez (taught annually in spring)
  • Environmental Archaeology
  • Molecular Archaeology
  • Alcohol in the Ancient World
  • Unraveling the Anthropocene
  • Floods, Famine, and Flus: Archaeology of Disaster
  • The Art of Publication (graduate seminar)

 

Selected Publications

Ebert, Claire E., Sean W. Hixon, Gina M. Buckley, Richard J. George, Sofía Pacheco-Fores, Juan Manuel Palomo, Ashley E. Sharpe, Oscar R. Solís-Torres, J. Britt Davis, Doughlas J. Kennett, and Ricardo Fernandes. 20204. The Caribbean and Mesoamerica Biogeochemical Isotope Overview (CAMBIO). Scientific Data 11:349. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-024-03167-6

Ebert, Claire E. 2023. The Formative Period in Mesoamerica. In Encyclopedia of Archaeology, 2nd ed., edited by Thilo Rehren and Efthymia Nikita. Vol. 3, pp. 313-326. Academic Press, Oxford.

Ebert, Claire E., James McGee, and Jaime J. Awe, 2021. Early Monumentality in the Belize River Valley: Excavations of a Preclassic E-Group at Cahal Pech, Belize. Latin American Antiquity 32:209-217.

Ebert, Claire E., Asta Rand, Kirsten Green-Mink, Julie A. Hoggarth, Carolyn Freiwald, Jaime J. Awe, Willa R. Trask, Jason Yaeger, M. Kathryn Brown, Christophe Helmke, Rafael Guerra, Marie Danforth and Douglas J. Kennett, 2021. Sulfur Isotopes as a Proxy for Human Diet and Mobility from the Preclassic through Colonial periods in the Eastern Maya Lowlands. PLOS ONE 16(8):e0254992. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0254992

Life and Death Among the Earliest Maya: A Review of Early and Middle Preclassic Burials from the Maya World. Ancient Mesoamerica 32:545-557.

Ebert, Claire E., Julie A. Hoggarth, Brendan J. Culleton, Jaime J. Awe and Douglas J. Kennett, 2019. The role of diet in resilience and vulnerability to climate change among early agricultural communities in the Maya Lowlands. Current Anthropology 60(4):589-601.

Ebert, Claire E., Daniel Pierce and Jaime J. Awe, 2019. Preclassic ceramic economy in Belize: neutron activation analyses at Cahal Pech. Antiquity 93:1266-1283.

Ebert, Claire E., Nancy Peniche May, Brendan J. Culleton, Jaime J. Awe and Douglas J. Kennett, 2017. Regional response to drought during the formation and decline of Preclassic Maya societies. Quaternary Science Reviews 173:211-235.

You can find a full list of publication and links to the papers here.