News Archive

Albany Times Union - June 16, 2020 - Black Americans in upstate New York are suffering more from COVID-19 than those in New York City. The health disparities in the pandemic reflect past and ongoing disparities in the health of the state’s population. While New York City is the state’s epicenter of the pandemic and much attention has been paid to the far higher rates among African-Americans in the city, the upstate situation is worse, according to state Department of Health statistics.

Members of the Anthropology Department send out congratulations to Anthropology students who graduated in the class of 2020.

Jennifer Burrell of Anthropology and two collaborators will conduct one of the first empirical studies on how geospatial technologies are being used around the world in criminal and human rights judicial investigations, thanks to a new National Science Foundation (NSF) grant. Burrell, working with co-PIs Kamari Maxine Clarke of UCLA and Sara Kendall of Kent University Law School in the United Kingdom, will receive $299,999 over three years from the NSF’s Cultural Anthropology and Law and Science programs for the project “Geospatial Technologies, Justice and Evidentiary Procedure.” The highly competitive award provides support for multi-sited research on three continents.

A team of interdisciplinary researchers are turning to a global event 4,200 years ago for insight on human adaptation to climate change. The project, led by UAlbany archaeologist Robert Rosenswig, has received $1.6 million in funding over five years from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to reconstruct human occupation, food production and tropical forest species diversity in the lowlands of northern Belize around the “4.2k BP” event.

The Maritime Archaic people thrived in harsh coastal conditions for nearly 5,000 years before disappearing around 1,000 B.C. Yet very little is known of their settlements, their social organizations, and how these were affected by ecological factors. A University anthropologist and three UAlbany students recently set about filling in the gaps on a two-week exploration in Newfoundland.

ALBANY, N.Y. (July 9, 2019) — In the hands of the young archaeologist, the detritus of a civilization offers pearls of enrichment, culturally and educationally. It is for this reason that Associate Professor Sean Rafferty of Anthropology has teamed for 13 years with New York State Archaeologist Christina Rieth to offer a field school at the Pethick Site in Schoharie that explores four Native American cultures — the oldest extending back to 4,000 B.C., the most recent to the mid-19th century.

At the Pethick Site in Schoharie County, students immerse themselves in history through the excavation of artifacts dating back thousands of years. Pethick, now in its 13th season of excavation as an archaeological field school, is a rich and important Native American site and to date has yielded almost 500,000 artifacts and over 1,000 soil features.

Congratulations to Anthropology Professor Dr. Lawrence M. Schell who has been promoted to Distinguished Professor!