UGA Anthropology professor Suzanne Pilaar Birch is the senior author of a new study that helps uncover how people moved across ancient Türkiye. Working with UGA alumnus and co-author Maxwell Davis and other collaborators, the team improved the chemical mapping tools archaeologists use to study ancient mobility.

Adarsh Kumar Shahi is a first-year Ph.D. student in Anthropology and Integrative Conservation (ICON) at the University of Georgia. He is interested in questions of Land and Forest rights, Protected Areas and Conservation, the ontology of loss and the entangled lives of humans, non-human and other-than-human entities. 

Anthropology has always been about understanding people, but how often does that understanding reach the public it seeks to serve? That question sits at the heart of a growing movement to reconnect anthropology with the broader public, and the University of Georgia’s Department of Anthropology is helping lead the way.

My master’s research focuses on understanding relationships between modern Indigenous ceramic practice and Native studies concepts like survivance, generational knowledge transmission, and traditional ecological knowledge. By examining Native studies literature alongside conversations with potters and community members, I hope to produce research that is grounded in lived experience and contemporary practice.

I am a first-year Ph.D. student in the Anthropology program, with research interests in rural development, agricultural sustainability, climate change adaptation, and environmental justice. My work is driven by a desire to understand how farming communities, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and rural areas of the United States, adapt to environmental and economic challenges in ways that promote resilience and long-term sustainability.

Delancey Paden Griffin, an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation from Oklahoma, is an incoming Ph.D. student working under the guidance of Dr. Victor Thompson. Her research focuses on Indigenous Archaeologies in the Southeastern United States, particularly on the intricacies of conducting collaborative archaeology on ancestral land with forcibly removed Tribal Nations.

I am an incoming Ph.D. student in Anthropology at the University of Georgia, where I will be working with Dr. Salmi in her Primate Behavioral Ecology Lab. I have a background in animal biology and behavioral research, with an M.S. in Integrative Biology from Kennesaw State University and a B.S. in Biology from Georgia Tech. My research interests focus on social behavior in nonhuman animals, particularly highly social mammals like western lowland gorillas.

The Department of Anthropology extends our warmest congratulations to this year’s graduating students! We are proud to call you alumni and look forward to seeing the impact you will make in the world!

Featured in Science News, recent advances in radiocarbon dating are reshaping our understanding of Indigenous history in eastern North America. UGA's Dr. Jen Birch worked with Dr. Sturt Manning of Cornell University to redate the Jean-Baptiste Lainé Site in Ontario.