University of Georgia Department of Anthropology / Ecological and Environmental

Faculty Directory

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  Jennifer Birch

  Assistant Professor

  Office: Baldwin Hall 105 J

  Phone: (706) 542-1959

  jabirch@uga.edu

  Research projects:

  My research explores historical trajectories of socio-political change among precontact Native societies of Eastern North America. Conceptually, this work is underpinned by a desire to explore the relationship between long-term processes of cultural change and the lived experience of individuals and communities.

  My ongoing research in Northeastern North America comprises a multi-scalar settlement study of precontact Huron-Wendat village relocation sequences in order to examine changes in the organization of the built environment as communities came together into large, fortified village aggregates. An ongoing component of my research in Ontario is the investigation of a site sequence which represents more than 500 years of contiguous occupation by a single community. One of these villages, the Mantle site, is the largest and most complex excavated to date in the Lower Great Lakes. I am currently preparing a co-authored manuscript for AltaMira Press which tells the story of the Mantle site in the context of the historical development of Northern Iroquoian societies, weaving together analyses of regional and detailed individual site settlement patterns, environmental and land-use modeling, and archaeometric analyses of ceramics and human remains.

  I am also developing a long-term, multi-sited research project which will investigate the Late Woodland-Mississippian transition in different social and environmental contexts across the state of Georgia. My intent is to combine existing data on settlement patterns and extant collections with new excavations that target communities on the cusp of the Late Woodland-Mississippian transition. This project would seek to explain the development of economic, religious, organizational, and material culture attributes associated with Mississippian societies, together with the co-evolution of archaeological and ecological landscapes. My hope is to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of how Mississippian cultural traits and institutions were adopted by or introduced to Late Woodland populations in specific local contexts.

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  J. Peter Brosius

  Professor

  Director, Center for Integrative Conservation Research

  Office: Baldwin Hall 264 B

  Phone: (706) 542-1463

  Fax: (706) 542-3998

  Lab: CICR

  Phone: (706) 425-3318

  pbrosius@uga.edu

  Research projects:

  My research links anthropology and conservation. I have a long-standing interest in the human ecology of Southeast Asia, particularly with respect to issues of environmental degradation.

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  Ervan Garrison

  Professor

  Office: Baldwin Hall 265A

  Phone: (706) 542-1470; (706) 542-1097

  Fax: (706) 542-3998

  Lab: Barrow Hall 14

  egarriso@uga.edu

  Research projects:

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  Laura German

  Assistant Professor

  Office: Baldwin Hall 255

  Phone: (706) 542-5852

  Fax: (706) 542-3998

  lgerman@uga.edu

  Research projects:

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  Ted Gragson

  Professor

  Department Head

  Office: Baldwin Hall 250

  Phone: (706) 542-1479

  Fax: (706) 542-3998

  Lab: Baldwin Hall 254

  Phone: (706) 542-6160

  tgragson@uga.edu

  Research projects:

  My research centers on human decision-making and resource use at a landscape scale. I use diverse sources of evidence including interviews, cartography, and archival sources to link individuals to their natural and social environments in time and through space.

  I am the Lead Principal Investigator of the Coweeta Long Term Ecological Research Project, which is a transdisciplinary project examining the consequences that climate change and changing land use practices will have on southern Appalachia. Southern Appalachia as a region is both a ‘water tower’ to the Southeast and among the most biodiverse temperate regions in the U.S. if not the world. This research provides knowledge to other scientists, policy makers and the public that is critical to planning and managing for the future.

  I also conduct research in the western Pyrenees of France on the millennial history of human activities and landscape. Documentary evidence indicates that valleys have been the fundamental unit of economy and society across the Pyrenees since at least the Early Middle Age while the evidence for livestock husbandry and transhumance goes back to the Neolithic. Our historical ecological research is divided into two principal axes drawing on a variety of natural and human archives. The first centers on reconstructing Souletin Basque organization of space and economy over the last 300 years, while the second centers on the co-evolution of mountain societies and landscapes from the early Holocene to the present.

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  Christina Joseph

  Part-time Assistant Professor

  Office: Baldwin Hall 105 I

  Fax: (706) 542-3998

  cjoseph@uga.edu

  Research projects:

  My current research project focuses on the impact of popular culture on identity formation among college students of South Asian descent in the U.S.

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  Stephen Kowalewski

  Professor

  Office: Baldwin Hall 257

  Phone: (706) 542-1462

  Fax: (706) 542-3998

  skowalew@uga.edu

  Research projects:

  Currently working in the Coixtlahuaca Valley, Oaxaca.
  Coixtlahuaca Project Web Site: http://shapiro.anthro.uga.edu/coixtlahuaca2008/

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  Derrick Lemons

  Lecturer

  Office: Baldwin Hall 105L

  Phone: 706-206-1927

  dlemons@uga.edu

  Research projects:

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  Virginia Nazarea

  Professor

  Director, Ethnoecology and Biodiversity Lab

  Office: Baldwin Hall 105 B

  Phone: (706) 542-3852

  Fax: (706) 542-3998

  Lab: Baldwin Hall 105 A

  vnazarea@uga.edu

  Research projects:

  I am interested in the interface between the way people see the elements and interrelationships in their environment with the way they decide and act in that environment. Further, I am concerned with the way the lenses people carry around in their heads are structured by the messages they received over time as they were growing up (and continue to receive when they are grown-up!) as members of a particular class, gender, and ethnicity. This concern has led me to explore a variety of different problems such as the distribution of local knowledge and the patterning of agricultural decision making of different categories of farmers, the relationship between marginality of production systems and the persistence of cultural memory that supports conservation of biodiversity, and the connection between mental maps and resource management practices of different groups of actors in a watershed.

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  Don Nelson

  Assistant Professor

  Office: Baldwin Hall 151

  Phone: (706) 542-1452

  Fax: (706) 542-3998

  Lab: Baldwin Hall G41

  dnelson@uga.edu

  Research projects:

  In collaboration with colleagues from the University of Michigan and Arizona State University and with NSF funding, we are exploring changes in drought vulnerability in NE Brazil over the last 15 years. Specifically, we developed a longitudinal data set that will allow us to explore the ways in which private and public adaptations have contributed to changes in vulnerability at the household level. One objective of the research is to determine the relative roles and the relationships between general investments (e.g. health care, education) with more targeted investments (e.g. drought insurance, drought tolerant crops). The research will contribute to improved understanding of adaptive capacity and the ways in which it is shaped through public and private investments.

  I am involved with the Unversidade Estadual Vale do Acaraú (UVA), Ceará in efforts to develop and launch a Master’s degree in Public Administration and Sustainable Development for the Semi-Arid. This initiative is founded on the principles of citizenry and participation and emerged from our experiences in developing Projeto MAPLAN. MAPLAN was a joint effort of the public sector and civil society designed to create a process of participatory development planning integrating local level contextual variations. Partners included the State Government of Ceará –the Secretariats of Planning and of Cities, FUNCEME (the state meteorological service) – and the Federal University of Ceará. The methodology, based on a Participatory GIS and the integration of local communities with state level planning, is a central component of the Master’s degree program.

  We have funding from the government of the State of Ceará to undertake an interdisciplinary exploration of climate adaptation and the changes in vulnerability trajectories throughout the state over the last 40 years. Together with researchers from The Federal University of Ceará, UC Berkeley and the University of Arizona, we will trace changes in sensitivity to climate variation through time and space. The team of social, natural and physical scientists will identify the roles of public policy, local institutions and local practices in the emergence of robust adaptation strategies. The findings are intended to help to guide regional development policies.

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  Sergio Quesada

  Sr. Academic Professional

  Undergraduate Coordinator

  Office: Baldwin Hall 253B

  Phone: (706) 542-6714

  Fax: (706) 542-3998

  squesada@uga.edu

  Research projects:

  I am currently researching the implications of migration to Georgia and the Southeastern United States of a community of peasants from the State of Querétaro, Mexico. In the last decade, these peasants were forced to relocate when the construction of a major World Bank-funded hydroelectric project, a product of the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), destroyed their communities in the early 1990's. I am exploring the impact of the loss of their main source of work, their land, and the subsequent loss of their cultural identity and how this impacts their environment, their economic well-being, their health status and their cultural traditions.

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  Laurie Reitsema

  Assistant Professor

  Director, Bioarchaeology and Biochemistry Laboratory

  Office: Baldwin Hall 151B

  Phone: 706-542-1458

  Fax: 706-542-3998

  reitsema@uga.edu

  Research projects:

  I study human diet as a link between biology, culture and environment, focusing on stable isotope analysis of archaeological populations. I am working primarily with European skeletal samples, and am beginning new research studying diet and stress among modern humans and non-human primates.

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  Elizabeth Reitz

  Professor

  Office: Georgia Museum of Natural History 10

  Phone: (706) 542-1464

  Lab: Georgia Museum of Natural History 1 and 6

  ereitz@uga.edu

  Research projects:

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  Susan Tanner

  Assistant Professor

  Director, Laboratory of Health and Human Biology

  Office: Baldwin Hall 266

  Phone: (706) 542-3085

  Fax: (706) 542-3998

  Lab: Baldwin Hall G39

  stanner1@uga.edu

  Research projects:

  I am interested in understanding how people maintain health and avoid disease in stressful environments and how human biological variation is shaped by diverse social, cultural, and ecological factors. My research is focused on anthropological approaches to the study of infectious disease, human growth, and medical and nutritional anthropology. I am currently exploring the ecology of early child growth in Bolivia and beginning new work on how culture change shapes health and nutrition in and around Athens, Georgia.

   

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  Victor Thompson

  Assistant Professor

  Office: Baldwin Hall 265B

  Phone: 706-542-1480

  Fax: 706-542-3998

  vdthom@uga.edu

  Research projects:

  My primary interests are in the societies that occupied the coastal and wetland areas of the American Southeast. Thus, the majority of my work has taken place in Florida and along the Georgia Coast. Specifically, I am interested in the ritual and ceremonial landscapes, subsistence systems, and the political development of the peoples who occupied these areas over extended time frames. As such, my work often encompasses time scales that cover the latter half of the Holocene (e.g., from the Late Archaic though Historic Contact). Yet another aspect of this work is understanding how societal trajectories in these regions impacted and articulated with local ecosystems.

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  Bram Tucker

  Associate Professor

  Lab: Behavioral Ecology and Economic Decisions Laboratory

  Office: Baldwin Hall 258

  Phone: (706) 542-1483

  Fax: (706) 542-3998

  Lab: Baldwin Hall 259

  bramtuck@uga.edu

  Research projects:

  My research addresses human decision-making and behavior in an ecological and evolutionary context, with specific focus on subsistence in rural populations. My students and I are concerned with two stages of analysis. The first is how individuals make decisions, including processes of perception, evaluation, emotion, and social learning, as explored through experimental economic methods. The second stage is the behavioral outcomes of decisions, including food production and household livelihood strategies, as explored through ethnographic methods.

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  Julie Velásquez Runk

  Assistant Professor

  Office: Baldwin Hall 256

  Phone: (706) 543-0617

  Fax: (706) 542-3998

  Lab: Baldwin Hall 252B

  Fax: (706) 542-3998

  julievr@uga.edu

  Research projects:

  My research addresses human conservation and use of landscapes, particularly rural forest and agricultural ones, and the political contexts in which they are engaged.  I also carry out research in cultural anthropology, including sociolinguistics and material culture.  My research is formed by studies in ecology and anthropology, as well as work as a conservation practitioner with international non-governmental organizations in Washington, DC and governments and local non-governmental organizations in Latin America.  I am an advocate for the use of multiple methods--from participatory ethnography to vegetation assessments to multi-scalar mapping--for the richness of data and depth they provide to research questions. My longer-term research has been in Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Panama, with mestizo, Black, and indigenous communities.

  I currently have on-going research in Panama on land grabbing, the history of collective land rights, modernization and material culture, sociolinguistics and language documentation of the Wounaan language, and the histories and practices of Black and indigenous silversmithing.

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  Mark Williams

  Sr. Academic Professional

  Director, Georgia Archaeological Site Files

  Director, Laboratory of Archaeology

  Office: Baldwin Hall 151 C

  Phone: (706) 542-1619

  Fax: (706) 542-3998

  Lab: Riverbend Road 110

  Phone: (706) 542-8737

  Fax: (706) 542-8920

  jmw@uga.edu

  Research projects:

  I have conducted archaeological research for some 20+ years now in the Oconee River valley of north and central Georgia, almost exclusively on sites of the late prehistoric Mississippian period. This little valley in Athens' backyard has an incredibly rich human story to be told and exhibits one of the densest human occupations in a pre-state temperate region in the world. This story is perhaps most significant with respect to the growth and eventual decline of the native chiefdom societies in this region. From about 1100 A.D. until 1600 A.D. a series of mound centers--chiefly towns were established, flourished, and eventually died out. The complex story of these centers, and the thousands of associated farmsteads, has occupied almost all of my research time during these years. These centers include the Dyar, Scull Shoals, Shoulderbone, Little River, Shinholser, and Sawyer sites.

  
  While the broad outlines of the Mississippian cultures in the Oconee Valley and their history have now become somewhat clearer, I have recently begun a more intense study of one of these sites in particular, Little River. This site is located in Morgan County, Georgia, and is apparently a tiny chiefly compound. These on-going excavations are important for helping us understand the workings of such a compound, both specifically in the Oconee Valley, and to the understanding of chiefdoms in the world beyond. My goal is to continue these excavations, actively involving University of Georgia Anthropology students, for several more years at least. This work is constantly being done in direct cooperation with my colleagues here in the Department, especially Ervan Garrison. He and his students, along with my own, have conducted fascinating and important remote-sensing studies at Little River, which will continue into the future.