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 ancestral knowledge and relational ontologies shape Indigenous environmental politics.

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.

One of Sammantha Holder’s research projects is her bioarchaeological engagement with massed remains of Napoleon's Grand Army soldiers and troop followers who were killed at once by the brutal onset of the Lithuanian weather while attempting an invasion of Russia. This work is featured in Archaeology magazine.

Click here to read the article.

The official blog of SMASH: The Singer-Moye Archaeological Settlement History Project. Investigations of a Mississippian town, in the lower Chattahoochee River valley is updated by Assistant Professor Jennifer Birch, who is running the 2017 field school. Keep up with the team's progress as it happens on the blog itself: http://bit.ly/2sVmjuk

Associate Professor Laura German (center, with flag) has just returned from teaching a course at the International Center for Land Policy Studies and Training in Taoyuan, Taiwan. The one-week course, entitled, “Situating the Local in Land Relations,” was part of a one-month course on Land Policy for Sustainable Rural Development for professionals from 31 countries.

Faculty member Mark Williams now holds emeritus status within the department. He remains director of both the university’s archaeology laboratory and the Georgia Archaeological Site File.