Faculty

Emily Wanderer

 

Emily Wanderer is a cultural anthropologist who uses ethnographic research to study the environment, health, technology, non-human animals, and Latin America. She received her Ph.D. from MIT’s program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society.

Research Description

Her current research, supported by funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation, examines the datafication of wildlife. Over the past few decades, scientists have developed an ever-expanding network of technology for tracking and monitoring wildlife. This network includes animal-borne tags, autonomous recording devices, and other sensors, as well as machine learning and AI tools. Her research examines how these tools have changed the way animal life is tracked, quantified, and understood and the broader impact of datafication and AI on conservation, animal management practices, and ecology as a science. Through ethnographic research, she investigates how AI and other emerging technologies are reformatting human relationships with animals. Implicit in tech for conservation initiatives is often the idea of a better Anthropocene for nonhumans, one in which the human impact on the world is used to improve ecological systems. While the Anthropocene represents an unintended and unplanned transformation of ecosystems and lives, this project considers how a better Anthropocene calls for the cultivation of even animals categorized as “wild.”

The Datafied Animal in the Pitt Annual Research Report

Her first book, The Life of a Pest: An Ethnography of Biological Invasion in Mexico (California, 2020) is on the politics of nature in Mexico. In it she examines biopolitics and biosecurity beyond the human, analyzing how scientists studying ecosystems, agriculture, and infectious disease thought about and manage the relationships between humans and nonhuman life forms. The Life of a Pest was a finalist for the 2022 Rachel Carson Prize from the Society for the Social Studies of Science.

 

Graduate Recruitment

I am accepting graduate students for AY 26-27. I work with students from a range of disciplinary backgrounds whose research interests overlap with my own. Interested students may email me with any questions.

 

Courses

Anthropology of Science: Global Perspectives

Undergraduate seminar. Science and technology are integral to contemporary societies. Understanding how science is produced and how it shapes daily life is a crucial challenge for anthropologists, who have studied the production of scientific knowledge in labs, hospitals, field sites, and elsewhere. While early studies of science as a cultural practice focused primarily on the U.S. and Europe, science and technology are produced and consumed globally. Through analyses of case studies of biotechnology, medicine, genetics, conservation, agriculture, energy, climate science, and computing around the world, this class will investigate the global dynamics of science and technology. Juxtaposing readings on different scientific fields from around the globe, we will look for recurring themes that connect these studies. What happens when science and technology travel, and how do new places emerge as centers of knowledge production? How are culture, identity, technology, and science linked?

Core Course in Cultural Anthropology

Graduate seminar. This course in an intensive, graduate-level introduction to key theoretical paradigms in Euro-American sociocultural anthropology since the late-19th century. The purpose is to track some of the ways that the discipline has been shaped through specific debates, controversies and lines of inquiry. In the first half of the course we examine an evolving discourse on such topics as culture, function, society, structure, comparison, objectivity, materiality, symbols and signs, agents, history, change, practice, method, politics and anthropology’s status as a social science. And we consider how lines of inquiry that were formed at an earlier stage return later in altered form. Throughout the semester, partner readings will also destabilize “the canon,” calling attention to its construction, who is left out, and how the history of theory in cultural anthropology also bears the imprint of hierarchy, position and privilege. In the second half of the course we consider anthropology’s many “reflexive turns” moments when critical theory took a more central place in the discipline. Topics covered include gender and sexuality, race, knowledge, power, difference, decolonization, ontology and posthumanism.

Global Pharmaceuticals

Undergraduate seminar. This course examines pharmaceuticals as cultural and social phenomena, following their development, production, marketing, and use around the globe. We will investigate issues including the growing number of drugs prescribed to Americans each year, the lack of access some populations have to essential medicines, the increasingly global nature of clinical trials, and the role of pharmaceutical companies in the opioid crisis. We will use the study of drugs and medicines to analyze the production of medical knowledge, changing perceptions of health and illness, and the role of the state and the market in the development and distribution of therapeutics. Pharmaceuticals bring together science, clinical practice, marketing, and consumerism, and this course will draw on anthropological research to trace the role they play in global flows of knowledge, capital, commodities, and people.

Health and Environment in Pittsburgh

Undergraduate seminar. The city of Pittsburgh and its surrounding environs are exemplary sites for understanding the relationship between environment and health. In this course, we will use medical anthropology to systematically investigate the effect of the environment on health and the interplay of natural and human systems. Drawing on research in political ecology, this class will consider the social, political, and economic systems that shaped Pittsburgh and its inhabitants. We will pay particular attention to the way changing industrial and environmental conditions changed incidence of disease, and how exposure to risk and disease are shaped by race, gender, and class. We will examine issues like the histories of air pollution and resource extraction including coal mining, oil and gas drilling and their impacts on the environment and health. The course will examine how knowledge about health is produced and the development of new forms of citizen science that enlist local residents in projects to monitor issues like air quality.

Introduction to Cultural Anthropology

Undergraduate lecture course. What is culture and how does it shape human experience? This course will introduce students to the anthropological study of culture and society, including the history of the discipline, anthropological theory, methodology, and ethics. We will cover classic topics in cultural anthropology like ritual and kinship, as well as newer ones like science and globalization. The class will draw on case studies from a variety of settings, both familiar and distant, to examine the diversity of human social life. In the second half of the class, we will analyze how individual and group identities are developed and maintained and the construction of categories of difference such as race, gender, and nationality. We will discuss the relationship between agency and structure, examining how people are both unique, individual actors and products of larger social forces.

Medical Anthropology II

Graduate seminar. This course is a seminar in medical anthropology, focusing on the key theoretical perspectives and methodological problems that have characterized the subfield. We begin with an overview of the emergence of the field of medical anthropology from early studies of rationality and belief, moving on to analyze diverse medical traditions and understandings and experiences of the body, health, and disease. We will discuss contemporary theory in medical anthropology as well as the construction of research problems from different theoretical perspectives in medical anthropology. The course will address approaches within medical anthropology to the social construction of illness and healing, sex, gender, race, markets and bioeconomies, and global health and humanitarianism. The goal of the course is to prepare students to conduct their own research and to engage in contemporary scholarly debates within the subfield of medical anthropology.

People and Other Animals

Undergraduate seminar. What can anthropology tell us about nonhuman life forms? This class examines the interconnections between humans and other life forms, looking at how human cultural, political, and economic activities are shaped by the animal, plant, and microbial forms that surround us and likewise how these life forms are shaped by human activities. Topics addressed will include the interactions of humans and other beings in agriculture, domestication, hunting, scientific research, medicine, pet-keeping, and conservation. We will consider the subjectivity and agency of the nonhuman, our moral and ethical obligations to other life forms, and critically examine divisions between culture and nature.

 

Publications

Von Essen, Erica, Emily Wanderer, Gabriel Lennon, and Karin Ahlberg. (2025) “The Wild Workforce: Enlisting Non-Human Labour in Invasive Species Management.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486241300941

Wanderer, Emily. (2024) “Bearly Recognizable: Facial Recognition and the Wild.” Science, Technology, & Human Values. https://doi.org/10.1177/01622439241304141

Wanderer, Emily. (2024) “Long Live the Lanternfly: Invasive Lifeforms, Extermination Campaigns, and Possibilities for Coexistence.” Tree News.

Wanderer, Emily. (2020) The Life of a Pest: An Ethnography of Biological Invasion in Mexico. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Wanderer, Emily. (2018) “The Axolotl in Global Circuits of Knowledge Production: Producing Multispecies Potentiality” Cultural Anthropology 33(4): 650-679. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca33.4.09

Wanderer, Emily. (2017) “Bioseguridad in Mexico: Pursuing Security Between Local and Global Biologies.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 31(3): 315-331. https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.12339

Wanderer, Emily. (2015). “Biologies of Betrayal: Judas Goats and Sacrificial Mice on the Margins of Mexico.” BioSocieties 10(1): 1-23. https://doi.org/10.1057/biosoc.2014.13

Joshua T. Schnell

Joshua Schnell is an anthropological bioarchaeologist specializing in the bioarchaeology of Mesoamerica, specifically the Maya region (Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras). His primary research interests concern health, medicine, body practices, and funerary practices in the archaeological past. His work emphasizes the role of human agency in the anthropological study of health, diet, and disease in the past – with a concern for how people managed, maintained, and altered their bodies. He conducts archaeological fieldwork in Chiapas, Mexico and is Co-Director of the Proyecto Arqueológico Bajo Lacantun (PABL) where he runs a bioarchaeological research program investigating the biosocial lives of the inhabitants of the ancient Lakamtuun kingdom. He also has an ongoing collections-based research program investigating the oral care and dental practices of the precolonial Maya.

Dr. Schnell’s work is fundamentally interdisciplinary and often incorporates ethnohistoric, ethnographic, archaeobotanical, archival, ethnomedicinal, and visual evidence alongside human biology and material culture. Before joining the faculty at Pitt, he was a Pre-Columbian Studies Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington, DC and has additionally held fellowships at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, RI and the National Science Foundation. At Pitt, he runs a lab specializing in experimental archaeology and microscopy. Dr. Schnell always welcomes undergraduate and graduate student research involvement in his lab and field endeavors. While his current fieldwork is based in Chiapas, Mexico, he has previously conducted field work across the Maya region - in Belize, Guatemala, and Mexico at a variety of Classic and Pre classic sites, including large, dynastic civic-ceremonial urban centers, small frontier and subsidiary sites, and mortuary rock shelters and caves.

Dr. Schnell is currently accepting PhD students in the following areas:

  • Bioarchaeology of the ancient Americas, especially of the precolonial Maya and Mesoamerica more broadly (Note: while Dr. Schnell is not a specialist of the ancient Andes, co-advising with Drs. Arkush or Bermann may be a possibility)
  • Paleopathology and experimental bioarchaeology
  • (Bio)archaeological approaches to the study of medicine, medical knowledge, medical practice, and dentistry in the past
  • Archaeology of the Maya region – especially those who might be interested in participating on PABL

Degrees and Education

PhD,Anthropology, Brown University
MA, Anthropology, Brown University
BS, Anthropology, Michigan State University
BA, Religious Studies, Michigan State University

Research Description

In broadest strokes, I am interested in how the body was understood, maintained, and altered - both during life and after death - in the archaeological past. My interests primarily lie in bioarchaeological approaches to the study of medicine, healing, and the body in the past, including:

(1) the treatment of the dis-eased body via medical and therapeutic practices,
(2) the maintenance of bodily health via diet, hygienic practices, and routine care,
(3) the creation and upkeep of the aesthetic or “crafted” body and its intersection with health, and
(4) the treatment and processing of the postmortem body, or corpse.

Methodologically my work is both bioarchaeological and paleopathological, but I make extensive use of imaging and microscopy as well as interdisciplinary methods such as archival research, iconography and visual culture studies, and ethnobotany and ethnomedicine.

I conduct an ongoing project documenting evidence for oral care, dental hygiene, and aesthetic expression of the mouth in the Maya world. The human dentition provides a unique opportunity to examine both quotidian and self-directed forms of care (such as toothbrushing and other cleansing practices)  and practices reflecting specialized knowledge such as therapeutic and herbal treatments, including oral surgery and tooth extractions. Understanding how people cared for their mouths within their specific cultural context, and how those practices might intersect with broader cultural values such as hygiene, sociality, aesthetics, and even morality can tremendously enhance our study of health and disease in the past. Through this work, I am also working with colleagues in paleoethnobotany, biomolecular anthropology, and dental science to advance a holistic model for the study of the mouth in the archaeological past. My work is fundamentally biocultural and interdisciplinary and I am committed to exploring and developing new, innovative methodologies and approaches for advancing the study of health and disease in the past. I believe this work should always be culturally-grounded, which is why I incorporate iconography, visual culture, ethnohistory, and ethnography in my research.

 

I have additional research interests in archaeological representation in gaming (digital and analog), collecting practices and research in/of collections, and the cultural adornment of the body before, during, and after death.

Courses

  • Introduction to Biological Anthropology
  • Biological Anthropology Graduate Core Course
  • The Archaeology of Medicine 
  • The Decorated Body
  • Bioarchaeology
  • Paleopathology
  • Human Biological Variation

 

Publications

  • Schnell, Joshua T. 2024. “Ancient Maya Oral Care Practices.” General Anthropology, 31(1-2): 9-13. https://doi.org/10.1111/gena.12125 
  • Scherer, Andrew K., Ricardo Rodas, Joshua T. Schnell, Mónica Urquizú, and Omar Alcover Firpi. 2024. “The Man of Macabilero: An Osteobiography of Perseverance.” In Mesoamerican Osteobiographies: Revealing the Lives and Deaths of Ancient Individuals, edited by Gabriel Wrobel and Andrea Cucina. University Press of Florida, Gainesville.
  • Watson, Sarah E., Joshua T. Schnell, Shanti Morell-Hart, Andrew K. Scherer, and Lydie Dussol. 2023. “Healthcare in the Marketplace: Exploring Maya Medicinal Plants and Practices at Piedras Negras, Guatemala.” Ancient Mesoamerica, 34(2), 383-406. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956536122000037
  • Scherer, Andrew K., and Joshua T. Schnell. 2022. “Maya Bioarchaeology.” In The Routledge Handbook of Mesoamerican Bioarchaeology, edited by Vera Tiesler, pp. 168-180. Routledge, London.
  • Hernandez-Bolio, Gloria I., Patricia Quintana, Marco Ramírez-Salomon, Elma Vega-Lizama, Michele Morgan, Joshua T. Schnell, Andrew Scherer, and Vera Tiesler. 2022. “Organic Compositional Analysis of Ancient Maya Tooth Sealants and Fillings.” Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, 43, 103435. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2022.103435
  • Scherer, Andrew K., Charles Golden, Stephen Houston, Mallory Matsumoto, Omar A. Alcover Firpi, Whittaker Schroder, Alejandra Roche Recinos, Socorro Jiménez Álvarez, Mónica Urquizú, Griselda Robles Pérez, Joshua T. Schnell, and Zachary X. Hruby. 2022. “Chronology and the Evidence for War in the Classic Maya Kingdom of Piedras Negras.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 66, 101408. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2022.101408
  • Schnell, Joshua T., and Andrew K. Scherer. 2021. “Classic Maya Dental Interventions: Evidence for Tooth Extractions at Piedras Negras, Guatemala.”  Bioarchaeology International, 5, 47-67. https://doi.org/10.5744/bi.2021.1001
  • Golden, Charles, Andrew K. Scherer, Whittaker Schroder, Timothy Murtha, Shanti Morell-Hart, Juan Carlos Fernandez Diaz, Socorro del Pilar Jiménez Álvarez, Omar Alcover Firpi, Mark Agostini, Alexandra Bazarsky, Morgan Clark, George Van Kollias III, Mallory Matsumoto, Alejandra Roche Recinos, Joshua Schnell, and Bethany Whitlock. 2021. “Airborne Lidar Survey, Density-Based Clustering, and Ancient Maya Settlement in the Upper Usumacinta River Region of Mexico and Guatemala.” Remote Sensing, 13, 4019. https://doi.org/10.3390/rs13204109

Stephanie V. Love

Stephanie V. Love received a Ph.D. in linguistic and cultural anthropology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) in 2022. Before joining Pitt, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, participating in the interdisciplinary seminar “Repairing the Past.” 

In her first book (under review at the University of Chicago Press), Streets of a Million Martyrs: Poetics and Politics in Urban Algeria, she accompanies Algerians as they move through their beloved and deteriorating Oran—Algeria’s second-largest city—navigating the politically charged context of postcolonialism and shouldering burdens that contradict the freedom and futures for which a “million martyrs” fought and died. By paying close attention to people’s everyday language of and about the city, she demonstrates how city dwellers sustain a revolutionary spirit despite grappling with an all-too-recent history of violence, the crumbling infrastructure surrounding them, and ongoing efforts by the state to silence their diverse stories.

In their efforts to preserve their city and secure adequate homes for their families, ordinary Oranis have developed a vernacular, street-based language that highlights the city’s deteriorating fabric to challenge the postcolonial state, despite oppressive censorship that restricts what can be said in public. This grassroots language has constituted a creative insurgency with significant political potential. In fact, during her fieldwork from 2018 to 2020, a revolutionary movement (the Hirak) erupted seemingly out of nowhere. In Streets of a Million Martyrs, she demonstrates how the Hirak was made possible by this vernacular language, which articulated people’s deep desires for a different future while reckoning with complex and painful histories. In an ethnographic account that situates and historicizes revolution, she poses the following questions: What makes collective political action possible for a people weighed down by decades of despair and disillusionment? How do people create and express new political, social, and historical imaginations that escape both dominant state narratives and pervasive fear stemming from the 1990s civil war that killed between 150,000 and 200,000 people?  

In this book, Dr. Love advances studies on language materiality, colonial/postcolonial language politics, and urban anthropology to demonstrate that the city is not merely the stage for social action but the very form from which social action is made possible. Ordinary city dwellers she encountered during sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Oran revealed the world-making potential of what she calls everyday urban poetics. Broadly speaking, everyday urban poetics refers to the practices through which city dwellers draw collective attention to linguistic forms (placenames, jokes, metaphors, rhymes, moral anecdotes, and strategic code-switches) and urban forms (public spaces, monuments, buildings, cemeteries, the layout of streets, and types of city dwellers) for specific social-political purposes. These everyday linguistic practices can foster collective sentiments, images, and tropes carrying revolutionary political potential. Streets of a Million Martyrs explores where these everyday urban poetics come from and how remarkable yet ordinary people are compelled to redefine the realm of the possible through their everyday practices of dwelling in, speaking about, and navigating the city as forms of social and political action. 

Dr. Love is also dedicated to rethinking higher education in the post-pandemic world and has coordinated several pedagogical initiatives at CUNY, including the STEM Pedagogy Institute, Carnegie Educational Technology Fellowship, and the Heritage Arabic eBook project at the Center for Integrated Language Communities.

Degrees and Education

Ph.D. Anthropology, Linguistic and Cultural The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY), New York, NY

Research Description

Urban anthropology, postcolonialism, semiotics, history/memory, materiality, migration, language politics, poetics, spatiotemporal imaginaries (chronotopes), the dead/ afterlives, revolution, the Middle East and North Africa, exile, the Mediterranean

Publications

Books

Streets of a Million Martyrs: Poetics and Politics in Urban Algeria. (Under Review at the University of Chicago Press)

Bullaro, G. R. & Stephanie V Love. 2016. The Works of Elena Ferrante: Reconfiguring the Margins. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9781137590626

Peer-Reviewed Articles

Love, Stephaie V. In Press. Archives of Displacement: Vernacular History and Urban Cemeteries in Oran, Algeria. Comparative Studies in Society and History.

Cavanaugh, Jillian R., Stephanie V. Love, and Nikhil Sood. 2025. “Interdiscursivity: Conventions, Gaps, and Renegades.” Annual Review of Anthropology. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-072623-023919.

Love, Stephanie V. 2025. Colonialism’s Mortal Remains: Semiotic Landscapes of Ambivalence in Oran, Algeria. Semiotic Review. Special Issues: Place, eds. Jeffery A. Tolbert & Bryan Rupert. https://www.semioticreview.com/

Love, Stephanie V. 2024. The King of Martyrs: Poetic Parallelism and Postcolonial Publics in Urban Algeria. American Ethnologist, 51(4): 592-604. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13347

Love, Stephanie V. 2023. Echoes of ‘Dead’ Colonialism: The Voices and Materiality of a (Post)colonial Algeria­n Newspaper. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. 33(1): 72-91. https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.12392

Love, Stephanie V. 2021. The Poetics of Grievance: Taxi-drivers, Vernacular Placenames, and the Paradoxes of Postcoloniality in Oran, Algeria. City  & Society 33(3): 422-443.  https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ciso.12412

Love, Stephanie V. 2021. “Are we not of interest to each other?” A pedagogy of presence during the COVID-19 pandemic. Anthropology Now! 13(2): 65-76. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19428200.2021.1973330

Love, Stephanie V. & L. Wu. 2020. Are We in the Same Boat? Ethnographic Lessons of Sheltering in Place from International Seafarers and Algerian Harraga in the Age of Global  Pandemic. Anthropology Now! April 2020 issue. https://anthronow.com/press-watch/are-we-in-the-same-boat-ethnographic-lessons-of-sheltering-in-place-from-international-seafarers-and-algerian-harraga-in-the-age-of-global-pandemic

Love, Stephanie V. 2019. Decolonizing the Church/Decolonizing Language: Postcolonial Christianity, Language Ideologies, and the Morality of Teaching Vernacular Arabic (Darija) in Algeria. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education,18(1): 25-38. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15348458.2019.1575740

Love, Stephanie V. 2016. ‘Broken Arabic’ and Ideologies of Completeness: Contextualizing the Category of ‘Native’ and ‘Heritage’ Speaker in the University Arabic Classroom. Bellaterra Journal of Teaching and Learning Language and Literature, 9(2): 78-93. https://raco.cat/index.php/Bellaterra/article/view/310698 

Love, Stephanie V. 2016. An Educated Identity: The School as a Modernist Chronotope in Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels. In G. R. Bullaro and S. Love (eds.), The Works of Elena Ferrante: Reconfiguring the Margins (pp. 71-97). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Bullaro, Grace R. & Stephanie V. Love. 2016. Beyond the Margins: Ferrante Fever and Italian Female Writing. In G. R. Bullaro and S. Love (eds.), The Works of Elena Ferrante: Reconfiguring the Margins (pp. 1-12). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9781137590626

Love, Stephanie V. & Dora Kotai. 2015. The Invisible Learners in the Classroom: Macro-Level Politics and Micro-Level Experiences of LESLLA in Italy. In M. Santos & A. Whiteside, Proceedings from the 9th annual LESLLA (low educated second language and literacy acquisition) symposium. City College of San Francisco.

Love, Stephanie V. 2014. Mother Tongue: Identity in the Translingual and Transnational Narratives of Carmine Abate and Cristina Ali Farah. In G. R. Bullaro & E. Banelli (Eds.), Shifting and Shaping a National Identity in a Pluricultural Society: Transnational Writers in Italy Today (pp. 107-127). Leicester, UK: Troubador Italian Studies Series. https://www.amazon.com/Shifting-Shaping-National-Identity-Pluriculturalism/dp/1783063785

Love, Stephanie V. 2014. Language Testing, ‘Integration’ and Subtractive Multilingualism in Italy: Challenges for Adult Immigrant Second Language and Literacy Education. Current Issues in Language Planning, 15(3/4). Special issue. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14664208.2014.947017

Love, Stephanie V. & Manka Varghese. 2012. The Historical and Contemporary Role of Race, Language, and Schooling in Italy’s Immigrant Policies: Public Discourses and Pedagogies. International Journal of Multicultural Education, 14(2). Special Issue: Challenging Anti-Immigration Discourses in School and Community Contexts. (with M. Varghese). https://ijme-journal.org/index.php/ijme/article/view/491

Dela Kuma

Dela Kuma is an anthropological archaeologist who specializes in the archaeology of global encounters in Atlantic-era West Africa. Her current research, the archaeology of ‘legitimate’ trade, examines broad transformations in local taste practices and everyday life during the 19th-century Afro-European trade in the hinterlands of southeastern Ghana. She specializes in the use of archaeometry and archaeobotanical tools to answer archaeological questions concerning foodways, trade, and global entanglements. Dela has also worked on archaeological projects in Nigeria, Portugal, Italy, Israel, and Russia.

Region of Study

West Africa, Ghana

Topics

Archaeology, daily life, foodways, global encounters, local taste

Degrees and Education

PhD, Northwestern University

Research Description

I am broadly interested in questions about how local communities negotiate broader-scale developments at the intimate levels of the household and communities. I am specifically interested in how local people leverage sociocultural practices such as local conceptualization of taste to navigate through global entanglements and make consumption choices, and how these decisions manifest materially in the archaeological records.

In the short term, I am analyzing archaeobotanical remains recovered from Amedeka to understand changes in the practices of food preparations and consumption at the turn of the 19th century when Amedeka became entangled in the ‘legitimate’ trade. Preliminary analyses show well-preserved macrobotanical remains that suggest increased processing of palm oil which could be connected to changes in ceramic forms and shapes.

Daily Life and Domestic Economies in Hinterland Regions of Ghana

This long-term community-based collaborative archaeological research examines how domestic economies of hinterland regions in Ghana responded to the commercial developments in the Atlantic world from the 16th to 20th centuries, a period that encompasses the socioeconomic integration of African economies into the Atlantic trade through to the transitions into the so-called legitimate economies and into formal colonial regimes. I will start this work by expanding excavations at Amedeka and including archaeological data from a broad regional catchment area in the southern region of Ghana. Methodologically, this work will expand the Neutron Activation Analysis database that we have of the southern region combined with other interdisciplinary approaches, to understand how local people negotiated changes in the production, consumption, and exchange patterns at the microlevel of households and community levels.

Jennifer Muller

Jennifer Muller (PhD, University at Buffalo 2006) is a historical bioarchaeologist whose research explores the biological consequences of discrimination‐based inequities in 19th- and 20th-century African diasporic populations and the institutionalized poor. Her research, which integrates archaeological, archival, ethnographic, and skeletal data, aims to disrupt hegemonic narratives of the poor and the marginalized in the past. Through the investigation of the use of bodies in medical and anthropological training, her scholarship also examines how people who are discriminated against in life may also experience the negative consequences of inequity in death. Prior to coming to the University of Pittsburgh, she held appointments with the Department of Anthropology at Ithaca College, the City University of New York, and the W. Montague Cobb Laboratory at Howard University.

Degrees and Education

PhD, University of Buffalo, 2006

Research Description

Much of Jennifer Muller’s research has included bioarchaeological analysis of those interred in poorhouse cemeteries and US anatomical collections. Her research on the Monroe County Poorhouse and the W. Montague Cobb Skeletal Collection focused on the skeletal evidence of trauma and its connections to discrimination and racism in occupational opportunity. In recent years, she has explored trauma and disease in the past and its association with the social dis-abling of individuals with perceived impairments. Beginning in 2013, she has contributed to the Erie County Poorhouse Bioarchaeology Project (Buffalo, NY) through the analysis of the 67 child and infant remains from an excavated portion of the poorhouse. Many of these skeletal remains present with evidence of severe pathology. In- depth research of New York State historical documents reveals that poorhouse children (between 2 and 16 years of age) with perceived physical and mental impairments were considered deviant and unworthy of familial care or transference to orphanages. This research provides insight into the role of socially ascribed disability as a determinant of historical social welfare worthiness. This not only contributes to historical narratives but has direct relevance to our understanding of social welfare policy and practice today.

Critical to Jennifer Muller’s applied and engaged approach is the incorporation of descendant communities in research design, implementation, and outreach/education. She has also been involved in several projects aimed at local and descendant community partnership and advocacy for the preservation of sacred spaces and heritage management.

 

 

Courses

0620 Biocultural Anthropology

0680 Introduction to Biological Anthropology

0681 Introduction to Human Evolution
1600 Human Evolution and Variation

1750 Inequity & the Body

1805 Bioarchaeology

 

Recent Publications
 

Byrnes JF and Muller JL. 2022. A Child Left Behind: Malnutrition and Chronic Illness of a Child from the Erie  County Poorhouse Cemetery. International Journal of Osteoarchaeology. doi: 10.1002/oa.3130.

Muller JL. 2021. A Bioarchaeology of Inequality: Lessons from American Institutionalized and Anatomical Skeletal Assemblages. In: O. Cerasuolo (Ed.) Inequality in Antiquity. Buffalo, NY: State University of New York Press.

Muller JL., Byrnes, JF. and Ingleman, DA. 2020. The Erie County Poorhouse (1828–1926) as a Heterotopia: A Bioarchaeological Perspective. In: LA Tremblay and S Reedy (Eds.) The Bioarchaeology of Structural Violence: A Theoretical Framework for Industrial Era Inequality. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.

Muller JL. 2020. Reflecting on a More Inclusive Historical Bioarchaeology. Journal of Historical Archaeology 54(1):202-211.

Muller JL. and Butler MS. 2018. At the Intersections of Race, Poverty, Gender, and Science: A Museum Mortuary for Twentieth Century Fetuses and Infants. In: PK Stone (Ed), Bioarchaeological Analyses and Bodies: New Ways of Knowing Anatomical and Archaeological Skeletal Collections. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.

Byrnes JF and Muller JL. (Eds) 2017. Bioarchaeology of Impairment and Disability: Theoretical, Ethnohistorical, and Methodological Perspectives. Part of the series “Bioarchaeology and Social Theory” edited by Debra Martin. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.

Byrnes JF and Muller JL. 2017. Mind the Gap: Bridging Disability Studies and Bioarchaeology – An Introduction. In: JF Byrnes and JL Muller (Eds) Bioarchaeology of Impairment and Disability: Theoretical, Ethnohistorical, and Methodological Perspectives. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.

Muller JL. 2017. Rendered Unfit: ‘Defective’ Children in the Erie County Poorhouse. In: JF Byrnes and JL Muller (Eds) Bioarchaeology of Impairment and Disability: Theoretical, Ethnohistorical, and Methodological Perspectives. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.

Muller JL, Pearlstein K, and de la Cova C. 2016. Dissection and documented skeletal collections: legal embodiment of inequality. In: KC Nystrom (ed) The Bioarchaeology of Autopsy and Dissection in the United States. Bioarchaeology and Social Theory series, Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.

Watkins RJ and Muller JL. 2015. Repositioning the Cobb Human Archive: the merger of a skeletal collection and its texts. American Journal of Human Biology 27(1):41-50.

Steven Goldstein

Steven Goldstein (PhD Washington University in Saint Louis, 2017) is an anthropological archaeologist who studies long-term relationships between food systems, mobility, climate change, and technology over the last 12,000 years in eastern and southeastern Africa. After completing his PhD he undertook a 2 year post-doctoral position at the Max Planck Institute for Human History in Jena, Germany followed by a 3 year position as a Research Group Leader at the same institute before coming to Pittsburgh.

He has been directing community-based field projects in Kenya since 2014 and Zambia since 2017 that assess questions related to the spread of mobile pastoralism, origins of agriculture, and hunter-gatherer responses to environmental stress. To address these questions, he applies expertise in lithic technological studies, landscape archaeology, GIS, and geoarchaeological methods. His current field research largely centers on assessing how conditions of food security were impacted by the expansion of African states and beginnings of European colonialism over the last few hundred years. He is also engaged in a book project examining the social and economic transformations in herder lifeways across the last 4000 years in eastern Africa.

Degrees and Education

Washington University in Saint Louis

Research Description

Kakapel Archaeological Project: This collaborative project between the Max Planck Institute and the National Museums of Kenya investigates a 12,000 year record of demographic, economic, and climatic change at Kakapel Rockshelter, western Kenya. Excavations directed by Dr. Goldstein have revealed the largest record of plant food use in the region, including the adoption of diverse crops that arrived during migrations into the Lake Victoria Basin from different parts of the African continent. Coupled with archaeogenetic and paleoclimatic analyses, this project is building a unique perspective on when and how agricultural strategies developed in eastern Africa.

Origins of Agriculture in Zambia: Working with partners at the University of Zambia and Livingstone Museum, this project has involved excavations at several Early and Late Iron Age sites across Central and southern Zambia.  The goals of the project are to establish a high-resolution chronology for the arrival, spread, and intensification of lifeways based on mobile herding and plant agriculture.

Small-scale responses to large-scale climate change at Lothagam-Lokam: This project co-led by Dr. Goldstein, Dr. Elizabeth  Hildebrand (SUNY-Stony Brook), and Dr. Elizabeth Sawchuk (Cleveland Museum of Natural History) investigates how small-scale fisher-hunter-gatherer communities along the Lake Turkana Basin of northern Kenya responded to Climate change between c. 12000-5000 years ago. Paleoclimatic data reveals a complex pattern of regional rainfall change and local environmental shifts impacted the livelihoods of people living in the area. Archaeological analysis suggests people responded to local stresses through changes in the organization of group mobility, and to lasting aridification through technological innovation and intensification. These perspectives are providing new insights into how small-scale communities in the past successfully managed climatic crises.

Prehistoric Eastern African Quarry Survey (PEAQS): The PEAQS project seeks to identify and document patterns of lithic raw material access across eastern Africa. It is particularly focused on the diversity in stone quarrying strategies, core preparation strategies, and lithic reduction techniques applied at quarries and mines. By identifying these central nodes in long-distance regional exchange and interaction networks, we hope to better understand the relationship between stone-tool using peoples, mobility and land-use, trade networks, and economic organization. So far, research has included examination of obsidian quarries on Mt. Eburru and the Lake Naivasha Basin in Central Kenya.  

 

Courses

TBA

 

Publications

2022 Goldstein, S.T., Shipton, C., Miller, J., Ndiema, E., Boivin, N., Petraglia, M.  “Technological organization through the terminal Pleistocene and Holocene in eastern Africa’s coastal forests: Implications for understanding human-environment interactions.” Quaternary Science Reviews 280:107390. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2022.107390

2022 Goldstein, S.T., Farr, J., Kayuni, M., Katongo, M., Fernandes, R., Janzen, A., Markham, B., Crowther, A., & Boivin, N. “Excavations at the Iron Age village site of Fibobe II, Central Zambia.” Journal of African Archaeology. https://doi.org/10.1163/21915784-bja10012

2021 Mueller, N.G., Goldstein, S.T., Odeny, D., & Boivin, N. “Variability and preservation biases in the archaeobotanical record of Eleusine coracana (finger millet): Evidence from Iron Age Kenya.” Vegetation History and Archaeobotany. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00334-021-00853-y

2021 Goldstein, S.T., Crowther, A., Henry, E.R., Katongo, M., Janzen, A., Farr, J., Picin, A., Le Moyne, C., Boivin, N. “Revisiting Kalundu Mound, Zambia: Implications for the timing of social and subsistence transitions in Iron Age southern Africa.” African Archaeological Review 38(4): 625-655. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10437-021-09440-y

2021 Storozum, M., Goldstein, S.T., Conterras, D.A., Gidna, A., Mabulla, A., Grillo, K., & Prendergast, M.E. “Legacies of ancient herder settlement: soil development and landscape evolution on the Mbulu Plateau, Tanzania.” Catena 204:105376.

2021 Janzen, A., Richter, K.K., Brown, S., Mwebi, O., Gatwiri, F., Katongo, M., Goldstein, S.T., Douka, K., Bovin, N. “Distinguishing African bovids using Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS).” PLoS1 16 (5), e0251061.

2021 Goldstein, S.T. “Lithic technological organization of the “Elmenteitan” in southern Kenya: Implications for mobility and climatic resilience.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 61: 101259. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2020.101259.

2021 Bleasdale, M., Richter, K., Janzen, A., Brown, S., Scott, A., Zech, J., Wilkin, S., Wang, K., Schiffels, S., Desideri, J., Besse, M., Ndiema, E., Ogola, C., Manthi, F., Zahir, M., Petraglia, M., Trachsel, C., Nanni, P., Grossman, J., Hendy, J., Crowther, A., Roberts, P., Goldstein, S., Boivin, N. “Ancient proteins provide direct evidence of dairy consumption in eastern Africa.” Nature Communications 12(632).  https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-20682-3.

2020 Scerri, E., Kuhnert, D., Blinkhorn, J., Groucutt, H., Roberts, P., Zerboni, A., Orijemie, A., Barton, H., Candy, I., Goldstein, S., Hawks, J., N’Dah, D., Niang, K., Nicoll, K., Petraglia, M., & Vella, N. “Field based sciences must transform in response to COVID-19.” Nature Ecology & Evolution.

2020 Wang, K.*, Goldstein, S.T.*., Bleasdale, M.,  Clist, B., Bostoen, K.,  Bakwa-Lufu, P., Buck, L. T., Crowther, A.,  Dème, A., McIntosh,  R., Mercador Florin, J., Ogola, C., Power, R., Sawchuk, E., Willmsen, E., Petraglia, M., Ndiema, E., Manthi, F. K.., Krause, J., Roberts, P.,  Boivin, N., Schiffels, S. “Ancient genomes reveal complex patterns of population movement, interaction and integration in sub-Saharan Africa.” Science Advances 6(24). *Co-Corresponding authors

2020 D’errico, F., Shipton, C., Pitarch, A., Le Vraux, E., Goldstein, S., Boivin, N., Ndiema, E., Petraglia, M. “Trajectories of Middle to Later Stone Age cultural innovation in eastern Africa: the case of Panga ya Saidi, Kenya.” Journal of Human Evolution 141: 102737.

2019 Goldstein, S.T. “Lithic technology of the earliest herders at Lake Turkana, northern Kenya.” Antiquity 93 (372): 1495-1514

2019 Stephens, L., Fuller, D., Boivin, N., Rick, T….Goldstein, S (54th of 120)….Ellis, E.C. “Archaeological assessment reveals Earth’s early transformation through land use.” Science 365(6456): 897-902.

2019 Goldstein, S.T. “Infrastructures of pre-colonial food-security in eastern Africa,” In A. Logan & M. Shoeman (Eds) Useable Pasts Forum: Critically Engaging Food Security, African Archaeological Review. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10437-019-09347-9

2019 Goldstein, S.T. “The lithic assemblage from Sugenya: A Pastoral Neolithic site of the Elmenteitan    group in southwestern Kenya.”  Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa 54: 4-32.

2019 Goldstein, S.T. “Knowledge transmission through the lens of lithic production: A case study from the Pastoral Neolithic of southern Kenya.”  Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 26: 679-713.

2019 Capriles, J., Albarracin-Jordan, J., Lombardo, U.,Osorio, D., Maley, B., Goldstein, S.T., Herrera, K.A., Glascock, M.D., Domic, A., Veit, H., & Santoro, C.M. “Adaptation to High Altitude Ecosystems, and the Late Pleistocene Hunter-Gatherers of the Bolivian Andes.” Revista Textos Anthopológicos 20(9) :9-32.

2018  Marshall, F.B., Reid, R.E.B., Goldstein, S.T., Storozum, M., Wreschnig, A., Hu, L., Kiura, P., Shahack-Gross, R., & S.H. Ambrose.  “Ancient herders enriched and restructured African grasslands.” Nature 561: 387-390.

2018 Goldstein, S., Hildebrand, E., Storozum, M., Sawchuk, E., Lewis, J., Ngugi, C. & L. Robbins. “New archaeological investigations at the Lothagam harpoon site at Lake Turkana, Kenya.” Antiquity 91(360).

2018  Hildebrand, E., Grillo, K., E. Sawchuk, E., Pfeiffer, S., Conyers, L., Goldstein, S.,Hill, A.C., Janzen, A., Klehm, C., Helper, M., Kiura, P., Ndiema, E., Ngugi, C., Shea, J.J., and H. Wang.  “A monumental cemetery built by eastern Africa’s earliest herders near Lake Turkana, Kenya.”  Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 115 (36): 8942-8947.

2018 Sawchuk, E., Goldstein, S., Grillo, K., & E. Hildebrand. “Cemetery construction and the spread of pastoralism in eastern Africa.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 51: 187-205.

2018 Goldstein, S.T. “Picking up the pieces: Reconstructing lithic production strategies at a Late Holocene obsidian quarry in southern Kenya.” Journal of Field Archaeology 43(2): 85-101.

2018 Capriles, J., Albarracin-Jordan, J., Bird, D., Goldstein, S., Jarpa, G., Maldonado, C. & C. Santoro.  “Mobility, subsistence, and technological strategies of early Holocene hunter-gatherers in the Bolivian Altiplano.” Quaternary International 473b: 190-205.

2018 Grillo, K., Prendergast, M., Contreras, D., Fitton, T., Gidna, A., Goldstein, S., Knisley, M., Langley, M. & A. Mabulla. “Pastoral Neolithic Settlement at Luxmanda, Tanzania.”  Journal of Field Archaeology 32(2): 102-120.

2017 Goldstein, S.T. and J.M. Munyiri. The Elmenteitan Obsidian Quarry (GsJj50): “New perspectives on obsidian access and exchange during the Pastoral Neolithic of southern Kenya.” African Archaeological Review 34(1): 43-73.

2017 Frahm, E., Goldstein, S.T., & C.A. Tryon. „Forager-fisher and pastoralist interactions along the Lake Victoria shores, Kenya: Perspectives from portable XRF of obsidian artifacts from Kansyore rock shelters.” Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 11: 717-742.

2016 Goldstein, S.T. and C.M. Shaffer. “Experimental and archaeological investigations of geometric microlith function among Mid-to-Late Holocene herders in southwestern Kenya.” Journal of Archaeological and Anthropological Science 9(8): 1767-1788.

2016 Capriles J., Jordan, J., Lombardo, U., Osorio, D., Herrera, K., Maley, B., Goldstein, S.T., Domic, A. I., Glascock, M.D., Veit, H. & C. Santoro. “High-altitude adaptation and late Pleistocene foraging in the Bolivian Andes.” Journal of Archaeological Sciences: Reports 6: 46-474.

2014 Goldstein, S.T. “Quantifying endscraper reduction in the context of obsidian exchange among early pastoralists in southwestern Kenya.” Lithic Technology 39: 3-19.

Claire Ebert

Claire Ebert is an environmental archaeologist whose research explores the long-term dynamics of human-environment interaction in Mesoamerica. Based on field work in western Belize, she examines the emergence of complexity and urbanism among the earliest Maya agricultural communities and the fluctuating environmental and climatic contexts in which they appeared. She is a co-director of the Belize Valley Archaeological Reconnaissance (BVAR) Project and offers graduate and undergraduate student research opportunities in the field in Belize and in the Mesoamerican Archaeology and Isotopic Sciences (MAIS) Lab in the Department of Anthropology at Pitt. Her current projects include tracing urban trajectories through lidar-based remote sensing, settlement survey, and excavation at the Maya polity of Yaxox in western Belize, investigating human–animal relationships in ancestral Maya communities, and conducting geochemical sourcing analyses of pottery and obsidian to reconstruct networks of interaction. She also contributes to collaborative, open-access initiatives such as CAMBIO (the Caribbean & Mesoamerica Biogeochemical Isotope Overview) and URBank, both open-access initiatives which advance comparative research on biogeochemistry and urban adaptation across regions and timescales, respectively.

Prospective Students

Current PhD students working in the MAIS Lab apply environmental archaeology, human ecology, and/or stable isotope analysis to research questions within Mesoamerican archaeology. Students are also welcome to design studies related to ongoing projects in the lab, focusing on questions about environmental change, diet, and commensal relationships between people, plants, and/or other animals in Mesoamerica or elsewhere in the ancient world.

 

Courses

  • Ancient Mesoamerica (taught annually in spring)
  • Introduction to Archaeology
  • Environmental Archaeology
  • Molecular Archaeology
  • Alcohol in the Ancient World (writing seminar)
  • Unraveling the Anthropocene
  • The Art of Publication (graduate seminar)
  • Anthropology of Economies (graduate seminar)

 

Selected Publications

You can find a full list of publications and links to the papers here.

Ebert, Claire E. Before the Collapse: Agricultural Risk Management and Resilience in the Preclassic Maya Lowlands. In, Dagomar Degroot, John McNeill, and Amy Hessel (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Handbook of Climate History and Resilience. Oxford University Press, Oxford. (In Press)

Ebert, Claire E., Julie A. Hoggarth, Jose Mes, Frank K. Tzib. Collaborations between Archaeologists, Local Communities, and Heritage Specialists for Climate Change Solutions in Belize. Research Reports in Belizean Archaeology 19: 49-59.

Ebert, Claire E., Sean W. Hixon, Gina M. Buckley, Richard J. George, Sofía Pacheco-Fores, Juan Manuel Palomo, Ashley E. Sharpe, Oscar R. Solís-Torres, J. Britt Davis, Doughlas J. Kennett, and Ricardo Fernandes. 20204. The Caribbean and Mesoamerica Biogeochemical Isotope Overview (CAMBIO). Scientific Data 11:349. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-024-03167-6

Ebert, Claire E., James McGee, and Jaime J. Awe, 2021. Early Monumentality in the Belize River Valley: Excavations of a Preclassic E-Group at Cahal Pech, Belize. Latin American Antiquity 32:209-217.

Ebert, Claire E., Asta Rand, Kirsten Green-Mink, Julie A. Hoggarth, Carolyn Freiwald, Jaime J. Awe, Willa R. Trask, Jason Yaeger, M. Kathryn Brown, Christophe Helmke, Rafael Guerra, Marie Danforth and Douglas J. Kennett, 2021. Sulfur Isotopes as a Proxy for Human Diet and Mobility from the Preclassic through Colonial periods in the Eastern Maya Lowlands. PLoS ONE 16(8):e0254992. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0254992

Ebert, Claire E., Julie A. Hoggarth, Brendan J. Culleton, Jaime J. Awe and Douglas J. Kennett, 2019. The role of diet in resilience and vulnerability to climate change among early agricultural communities in the Maya Lowlands. Current Anthropology 60(4):589-601.

Ebert, Claire E., Daniel Pierce and Jaime J. Awe, 2019. Preclassic ceramic economy in Belize: neutron activation analyses at Cahal Pech. Antiquity 93:1266-1283.

Ebert, Claire E., Nancy Peniche May, Brendan J. Culleton, Jaime J. Awe and Douglas J. Kennett, 2017. Regional response to drought during the formation and decline of Preclassic Maya societies. Quaternary Science Reviews 173:211-235.

Ebert, Claire E., Mark Dennison, Kenneth G. Hirth, Sarah B. McClure, Douglas J. Kennett. 15.20Formative Period obsidian exchange along the Pacific Coast of Mesoamerica. Archaeometry 57(S1):54–73.

Ebert, Claire E., Keith M. Prufer, Martha J. Macri, Bruce Winterhalder, Douglas J. Kennett. 2014. Terminal long count dates and the disintegration of Classic Period Maya polities. Ancient Mesoamerica 25:337–356.