Bonnie Clark (continued)

Bonnie, who is an alum of the DU Anthropology Department (MA 1996), is pleased to be back among colleagues and friends in Colorado. The state is also the location of much of her field research in Historical Archaeology. Bonnie’s most recent project, focusing on late 19th Century Hispanic settlements in southeastern Colorado, has generated considerable public interest around the state. She presented her research to the Denver Historian’s Roundtable and the Trinidad Historical Society in the fall and will be speaking to the Colorado Society of Hispanic Genealogy this summer. Other summer plans include hiking and biking in the mountains, continuing to set up the Historical Archaeology lab, and work on book chapters and manuscripts.

Richard Clemmer-Smith

Richard Clemmer-Smith, Professor and Chair, spent a rewarding sabbatical getting the drafts of two books underway. One of them, Landscapes of Substance and Delusion: Western Shoshones and Americans, 1818-1910, examines the intrusion of trappers, emigrants, and miners into eastern Nevada and southern Idaho and consequent impacts on Shoshone subsistence strategies. The other is a study of the motivations of early collectors of Hopi-Tewa pottery around the turn of the 20th century, tentative titled Crusaders, Iconoclasts and Maverics: Collectors and the Origins of Native American Art and Tourist Pottery. Richard was also pleased that a book for which friend and well-known anthropologist Frances Quintana has long sought a publisher is finally being brought out in July by Altamira Press. Entitled Ordeal of Change: The Southern Utes and their Neighbors, the book boldly details the exploitation and the gradual recovery of the Southern Utes following American conquest of their ancestral lands. Richard contributed the “Afterward” for the book, which covers the period 1935-2003.

Larry Conyers

Larry Conyers will have his book titled Ground-penetrating Radar for Archaeology published this summer, which will be a much updated and more in-depth study than the first volume on this subject. This summer he will be traveling to Peru with National Geographic Society to work at the site of El Brujo on the north coast, and to Holland to work on coastal Neolithic settlements. Two of his graduate students that are working on ground-penetrating radar (GPR) archaeology are just completing their theses on buried Roman architecture at Petra, in Jordan and on Chaco Period settlements in southern Utah. Another will be traveling to Bolivia this summer to work on GPR mapping at Tiwanaku, near the shore of Lake Titicaca.

Tracy Bachrach Ehlers

Tracy Bachrach Ehlers has spent the academic year as Director of Graduate Studies for Anthropology. In that capacity, she has guided graduate students through Advanced and their Qualifying Exams, a challenging and exciting journey. As well, she continues to be on the Organizing Committee for the Conference on World Affairs, a yearly, week-long event that brings more than 100 writers, critics, activists, politicians, etc., to Boulder each spring. Tracy's book, Sugar's Life in the Hood, was a finalist for the Colorado Book of the Year. She is currently writing a paper on the Healthy Marriage Initiative based on her continuing research on gender relations in the African-American community in innercity Denver.

In May, Tracy is walking the Bay to Breakers with her sister and two weeks later, the Bolder Boulder. In the fall, she completed the Boulder Backroads Half-Marathon as a walker and is planning on doing the full Marathon this year.

Alma, the Golden Retriever, continues to be a favorite of all who enter the southwest wing of Sturm Hall.

Christina Kreps

Christina Kreps continues to edit the journal Museum Anthropology for the Council on Museum Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association. Heather Ahlstrom served as her editorial assistant until she resigned to take on a full time position at the Denver Art Museum in the Native Arts department.

Last year Christina was awarded a grant from the Ford Foundation to fund the Indonesian/University of Denver Exchange Program in Museum Training. As part of the first component of the program, Christina took two museum studies students, Heather Ahlstrom and Catherine Fitzgerald, to Indonesia for six weeks to work on cultural heritage preservation projects at two sites. The first site was the Museum Pusaka Nias, located in Genung Sitoli on the island of Nias. There the three worked with museum staff members on preventive conservation, exhibition design, and collections management. They then traveled to Sintang, West Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) to inventory and catalog Father Jacques Maessen’s private collection of ikat textiles in preparation for its donation to a community museum. The museum will be housed in a new archival building for the district. As part of the exchange program, Nata’alui Duhi from the Museum Pusaka Nias, and Novia Sagita from Sintang will be following a specialized training course at DU this coming fall. Their studies are being are funded by the Asian Cultural Council.
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Christina Kreps (continued)

Publications 2003
Liberating Culture:Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Museums, Curation, and Heritage Preservation. London: Routledge.

Curatorship as Social Practice. Curator, 43/1:311-323.

In press. “Pusaka as an Indigenous Concept of Cultural Heritage Preservation.”

In Performing Objects: Museums, Material Culture and Performance in Southeast Asia. Fiona Kerlogue, ed. Contributions in Critical Museology and Material Culture series. London: Horniman Museum and Gardens.

Forthcoming. “Non-Western Models of Museums and Curation in Cross-Cultural Perspective.” In A Companion to Museum Studies. S. Macdonald, ed. London: Blackwell Publishing.

In preparation:
“The Theoretical Future of Concept and Practice for Indigenous Museums.” In The Future of Indigenous Museums. Nick Stanley, ed. London: Berghahn Books.

Sarah Nelson, John Evans Professor

Sarah Nelson, John Evans Professor spent the year writing, editing, and traveling. The writing included grant proposals, one of which resulted in a grant from the National Science Foundation, Archaeology Program, for work on the perishables of Franktown Cave. Kevin Gilmore is co-PI. The AMS dates received so far on the perishables are exciting. Tune in next year for details. The new edition of Gender in Archaeology, Analyzing Power and Prestige, was out in time for the SAA meeting in Montreal. Other articles written this year are not yet in print.

As usual, Sarah travels. The best of this year were a trip to the Galapagos Islands, Valentine’s weekend in Paris, and a short trip to Madrid.
Sarah gave two papers at SAA, “Gender in Archaeology, What’s the Agenda?” and “Jades, Pigs, and Leadership in the Hongshan Culture.” She also was a co-organizer of a symposium in honor of Susan Kent. At the Association for Asian Studies, she was the discussant for a group of paper on Silk Road artifacts. Editing the AltaMira Gender in Archaeology Series is quite time-consuming.
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Sarah Nelson, John Evans Professor (continued)

Books in the series so far are:

2001
Gender and The Archaeology of Death, B. Arnold and N. Wicker, eds.
In Pursuit of Gender, edited by S. Nelson and M. Rosen-Ayalon

2002
Ancient Maya Women, edited by Traci Ardren
Sexual Revolutions: Investigating Activity Patterns During the Development of Agriculture, Jane Peterson.

2003
Ancient Queens: Archaeological Explorations, edited by S. Nelson
Ambiguous Images: Gender and Rock Art, Kelley Hays-Gilpin
Gender in Ancient Cyprus, Diane Bolger

2004
Gender in Archaeology: Analyzing Power and Prestige, 2nd revised edition. S. Nelson
Ancient Chinese Women, edited by Katheryn Linduff

Forthcoming:
Gender and Hide Production, edited by Lisa Frink and Kathleen Weedman
Gender and the Archaeology of Childhood, Jane Baxter

Lisa Saccomanno, Assistant to the Chair

Lisa Saccomanno, Assistant to the Chair, took a few months off this winter to have her first child. Jonas Connor Gilbert is healthy, happy and a frequent visitor to the Anthropology Department. Lisa would like to thank Kimberly Henderson and all the workstudy students for their help this year, especially while she was away.

Dean Saitta, Associate Professor

Dean Saitta, Associate Professor, completed an eight year run as department chair in September 2003. He is currently preparing to direct the DU Fall Term in London Program. Between August and December 2004 Dean will be in London teaching one course on ancient civilizations and another on British monumentality and urban planning for about 30 DU students. Architect- wife Martha Rooney and now four-year-old son Joe will accompany. Martha will re-charge professional batteries and help with walking tours of London, and Joe will undoubtedly delight in castles and military museums. Upon his return to DU in winter 2005 Dean will use his London experience in a new departmental course on Culture and the City, also offered as part of the Urban Studies program.

Dean’s work as Co-Principal Investigator for the Colorado Coal Field War Archaeological Project continues apace. The project has received its seventh straight year of six-figure funding from the Colorado Historical Society-State Historic Fund. A couple of books reporting project research are in the works.
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Dean Saitta, Associate Professor (continued)

Public presentations about the research have recently been given to the Colorado Historical Society, Heartland Labor Forum, Daughters of the American Revolution, Littleton Historical Society, and Rocky Mountain Explorers Club. Professional papers were presented to Colorado Preservation Inc., Front Range Symposium on Art History, and the Society for American Archaeology.

Recent publications about the Ludlow work found their way into New Labor Forum and a Blackwell volume on North American Archaeology. A chapter on archaeology and contemporary social problems was published in a Utah Press volume on Essential Tensions in Archaeological Method and Theory. Dean also solicited, edited, and contributed to a collection of papers memorializing Stephen Jay Gould for Rethinking Marxism. This is the only collection of papers in the massive Gould obituary that explicitly takes stock of the relationship between science and politics in Gould’s scholarly and popular work.

Bonnie Clark

Bonnie Clark, Assistant Professor, is the newest faculty member here in the Anthropology Department. Her first year of teaching has kept her busy, as she put together new courses like “Anthropologies of Place,” “Historical Archaeology,” and “American Material Culture.” Bonnie was pleased to participate, alongside Sarah Nelson, in a symposium at the Society for American Archaeology meetings, celebrating the 20th anniversary of the publication of “Archaeology and the Study of Gender.” Bonnie also presented at the Society for Historical Archaeology meetings on the promise of interdisciplinary work between historical archaeology and architectural history. That paper will be part of a new volume, Methodological Advances in Historical Archaeology, to be published by Plenum Press. In the interdisciplinary vein, Bonnie now serves on the Board of Directors for the National Collaborative for Women’s History Sites. Make sure to contact her if you are interested in this exciting new national group, as Bonnie serves on the Fund Development and Membership board.
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