Today, through August 4, join us in celebrating this year’s appreciation of archaeology in the state of Georgia. Here at UGA the work is always intense. On a typical day, archaeologists at the Laboratory of Archaeology and Georgia Archaeological Site File are busy doing research, training students, preserving and curating artifacts, and sharing information about the important pieces of Georgia history in their care.

My research explores how property is practiced in everyday life. The current wave of development and policy interventions intended to increase land tenure security and women's property rights globally warrant a renewed investigation of what property means in situated contexts, how people make property real in place through relationships to others, and how the possibilities for making claims may become circumscribed by increasing land pressures.

I am a doctoral student in the cultural anthropology program and part of the Community and Environment Lab supervised by Dr. Peter Brosius. I am also working toward a Graduate Certificate in Latin American and Caribbean Studies and am broadly committed to exploring the intersection of environmental issues and indigenous culture in South America. More specifically, my doctoral research examines how indigenous knowledge and ontologies of nature shape community-based conservation.

Cydney earned their PhD in Integrative Conservation (ICON) and Anthropology in April 2024. Their dissertation, entitled "Fluid Inequities: The Dynamics of Water Relations and Water Insecurities in Ceará, Northeast Brazil," explores how socionatural (i.e., interrelated sociopolitical, environmental, and technological) processes shape and are shaped by the lived experience of water insecurity in the semi-arid region of Ceará, Brazil.

Assistant Professor Jennifer Birch has been awarded an National Science Foundation grant for a project called “Establishing a High-Resolution Framework for Age Determination.” This research will, for the first time, construct a high-precision radiocarbon chronology for select Northern Iroquoian site relocation sequences in Ontario and New York State. The study aims to collect 245 new dates from 41 Iroquoian village sites.

Assistant Professor of anthropology and geology Suzanne Pilaar Birch had a dilemma. She’d just been offered her grant-funded fieldwork opportunity in Cypress, yet her son’s birth was just three months away. Was it safe? Were their other women scientists who had worked in the field while expecting? She turned to her co-created site, Trowelblazers, that both celebrates past and present archaeologists, paleontologists, and geologists and educates future scientists and the public about their contributions. It now provides a social network, too.