Faculty Research Activities

Sarah E. Jackson

Dr. Sarah Jackson joined the Department of Anthropology this year. Her research projects include revising her book on Identity Politics in the Court: Hierarchy and Change among the Late Classic Maya, and continuing work on ethnohistoric data related to contact-era indigenous governmental organization among the Maya. She has an article in the Spring 2009 issue of Ancient Mesoamerica, titled "Imagining Courtly Communities: An Exploration of Classic Maya Experiences of Status and Identity through Painted Ceramic Vessels." In May 2009, she is taking part in a conference at University College London on "Writing as Material Practice," the proceedings of which will be published by Left Coast Press. She'll spend Summer 2009 doing fieldwork in Belize at the site of Say Kah, and taking part in a Mellon workshop on Spanish Paleography (related to the development of her Colonial archaeology project in southern Guatemala) at the Huntington Library in California.

Clement Jeffrey Jacobson

Dr. Jacobson is currently working on research projects involving immigrant worker safety (funded by CDC/NIOSH), religious organizations' response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic (based in the UC Department of Public Health Sciences), and the measurement and assessment of physician work intensity. He is author or co-author on forthcoming articles to appear in Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry (on "nightmares") and the American Journal of Industrial Medicine (on translation of work-safety measures). He will be returning to Honduras this fall (2009) to continue research on rural mental health.

Jeremy Koster

Koster continues to work with his hunting data from Nicaragua. Accompanied by graduate student Maria Venegas, he recently returned to his field site to investigate ethnoecological perspectives on wildlife species in the Bosawas Reserve. He also acquired canine osteological remains, which are the subject of a collaborative isotopic analysis with Dr. Tankersley. Also, Koster recently took over as Director of Graduate Studies.

Anthony Perzigian

Dr. Perzigian represents the Department of Anthropology on the wider stage of UC through his position as Provost of the university. He remains active in anthropological circles, and recently has been promoting and underwriting the broad-based Darwin Sesquicentennial Celebrations at UC.

Leila Rodriguez

Dr. Leila Rodriguez joined the Anthropology department this year. She is currently focusing on publishing her work on self-employed Nigerian immigrants. In October, Dr. Rodriguez presented her new work on the employment transitions of Nicaraguan immigrants at the XXVI International Union for the Scientific Study of Anthropology International Population Conference, held in Marrakech, Morocco. In Summer 2010, she will begin fieldwork in Costa Rica to investigate accumulation, inequality and migration in the context of recent economic restructuring of the Central American region.

Vernon L. Scarborough

Dr. Scarborough has begun a two-year term as Head of the Department of Anthropology. He continues his work on the role that anthropological archaeology plays in informing present issues related to the environment and human impact on the environment. In particular, Dr. Scarborough has presented his work recently at meetings at the School for Advanced Research, a UNESCO-sponsored seminar in Paris, an international workshop on sustainability in Sweden, and a workshop on "Climate Crises in Human History" sponsored by the American Philosophical Society. Thanks to a National Science Foundation grant, he and colleagues from Biology and Geography will be going to Tikal, Guatemala in April to examine ancient landscapes and water systems.

Alan P. Sullivan

With National Geographic Society and Taft support, Dr. Sullivan returned to the Upper Basin in northern Arizona during October and November 2008 to "ground truth" satellite-based predictive models of site location that he developed with colleagues in the Department of Geography (including Anthropology alum Kevin S. Magee, now a doctoral student there). Helping Dr. Sullivan with the intensive survey were undergraduate students Chris Olsen (Anthropology) and Ben Metz (German Studies), Anthropology graduate students Matt Preece and Shelley Szeghi (who is heading to Grand Canyon National Park this summer as The Polk Science Intern in Archaeology), and former Anthropology undergrad and grad student Philip B. Mink (now a doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology, University of Kentucky). In addition, the entire crew participated in the re-burial of site MU 125, which had been excavated by Anthropology students during the early-mid 1990s. Among many discoveries, the survey located the largest sets of terraces and check dams ever described in Grand Canyon archaeology, which will be the focus of a future excavation project in the next year or two.

Kenneth B. Tankersley

With funding from the University of Cincinnati Research Council, the Charles Phelps Taft Foundation, and the Court Family Foundation, Ken Tankersley has made a number of exciting new archaeological discoveries in the Cincinnati area, which have attracted local, national, and international attention including the National Geographic Channel, the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, and BBC's Channel 4. This research focuses on how indigenous peoples in the Ohio Valley adapted to climate change and includes an archaeological field school at nearby Shawnee Lookout Park. These successes have helped lead to other exciting new developments for our students including the Court Family Foundation agreeing to fund the construction of a state-of-the-art archaeological research facility at UC's new Center for Field Studies in Miami Whitewater Park, the establishment of a new archaeology certificate program and a proposed new bachelor's degree in archaeology, which is currently under review by the Ohio Board of Regents.

Locke