Monique Borgerhoff Mulder is a human behavioural ecologist working on projects relating to life history, conservation, and global patterns of cultural variation. HBE-ers explore the big “Why“ questions about our species, such as why do people marry, what is the basis of gender roles in economic and social behaviour, why has fertility dropped so radically in most parts of the world, why are people such poor conservationists of natural resources, and many others.

Since joining Purdue in 1976, Professor Emeritus Blanton has done approximately 36 months of archaeological fieldwork over many field seasons in Guatemala, Mexico, and Turkey, and has also completed several cross-cultural comparative research projects.  He has reported on this research in twelve books and 67 articles and chapters published through diverse outlets, including Cambridge University Press, Science, American Anthropologist, American Antiquity, Journal of Field Archaeology, and Current Anthropology.  B

Biological Anthropology is the study of human variation, adaptation, and evolution. 

Photo by Katharine Napora

Faculty member Suzanne Pilaar Birch is interviewed about her experience of doing fieldwork while pregnant in this issue of Nature magazine. She shares the factors that went into her making that decision and relates the support she received. Along the way she initiated similar stories from women anthropologists on the website she runs as part of a team: trowelblazers.com.

Read the Nature article here.

The Geoarchaeology Laboratory is located in Barrow Hall 14. It is primarily a sedimentological and and pedological laboratory with analytical facilities to include particle-size determination and petrologic analysis using an Olympus stereo-microscope for hand samples and thin sections. More detailed petrographic microscopic analysis is done using an Olympus B20 research microscope located in GG307. The Laboratory has access to elemental and mineralogic analytical instrumentation such as a JEOL  electron microprobe capable of EDS and WDS located in the GG Building.

An international research team that includes assistant professor of anthropology and geography Suzanne Pilaar Birch has been awarded Arts and Humanities Research Council UK funding for their four-year project on Radical Death and Early State Formation in the Ancient Near East. 

“The body is parchment where violence is written.”

Apero: African Brown-Bag Lecture, as part of the African Studies Institute lecture series.

Lecture Flyer

In her newest Southeastern Archaeology publication, Jessica Cook Hale explores the underwater world of the Econfina Channel site in Apalachee Bay, Florida. Hale takes the plunge into offshore submerged sites to obtain valuable data concerning many questions of interest to archaeology, including what form coastal occupations may have taken during periods before the establishment of modern coastlines and late Holocene climate and ecological conditions.