Department of Anthropology | University of Waterloo

Welcome to the Anthropology department of the University of Waterloo. On these pages you can find out about our department, about the features and requirements of our undergraduate program, our graduate program, and links that will allow you to learn more about Anthropology.

........... what our professors are doing during their spring/summer research term:

Prof. Maria Liston:

Maria Liston, Chair of the Department, will spend her Spring research term in Athens. While there, she will be working in the Malcolm H. Wiener Laboratory at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens and in the museum of the Athenian Agora excavations. It is going to be a summer of writing, rather than new research projects. She is completing the work on a number of projects, including a well in the Agora containing the skeletons of over 450 infants and fetuses. It appears that this abandoned well was used to dispose of the bodies of neonatal infants who died of natural causes or suffered birth defects and were perhaps exposed. It is possible that the large number of bodies in the well is due to one or more midwives using it to dispose of infants who died around the time of birth. She is also writing a paper on skeletons found in a variety of other wells, all of whom appear to have died violently and been thrown into disused wells, perhaps to hide the bodies. Another project is completing a volume on the Early Iron Age cemetery at Kavousi, Vronda, in Crete. A final project is writing a chapter for a volume on warfare in the ancient world.

Prof. Nancy Barrickman:

Primate Behavior in Nicaragua
From mid-May to mid-June, I will be teaching a field course in Primate Behavior and Ecology in Nicaragua. The course is operated through the Maderas Rainforest Conservancy, which offers a wide range of courses.

http://www.maderasrfc.org/Maderas_Rainforest_Conservancy/Home.html

We will be living and working on Ometepe Island on Lake Nicaragua. Mornings will be spent in the forest observing the behavior and ecology of two monkey species: howlers (Alouatta palliata) and white-faced capuchins (Cebus capucinus). Afternoons are dedicated to lectures and research projects back at the research station.

Two anthropology undergraduates from Waterloo are taking the course, along with 10 other students from Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. Our TA is a Waterloo undergraduate who took the course last year.

In addition to coursework, I will be collecting some pilot data for my research project entitled "Why Be Juvenile?". I am interested in investigating the differences in behavioral development in howlers and capuchins.

Conservation and Local Communities in Tanzania
In July and the beginning of August, I will be in Tanzania working on a research project. I am examining the complex relationships between conservation practices and the welfare of local communities.

I work in the Udzungwa Mountains and adjacent Kilombero Valley. Details regarding the area and some of the research of my colleagues can be found on the website for Udzungwa Ecological Monitoring Centre and the Udzungwa Forest Project:
http://www.udzungwacentre.org/
http://www.flamingoland.co.uk/park/udzungwa-forest-project/udzungwa-forest-project-overview.html

I will be spending time in four villages surrounding the Magombera Forest, focusing on the lives of women. I am particularly interested in their perceptions of natural resource use and availability, and access to social services such as health care and education.

Primatology Conference
In mid-August, I will be presenting a paper entitled "Why Be Juvenile? Social development in lemurs" at the XXIV Congress of the International Primatological Society in Mexico.
http://www.ips2012.org.mx/index.html

Profs. Mary Jackes & David Lubell

Mary Jackes is planning for some conferences – coming up this summer is the Society of Africanist Archaeologists in Toronto, in part organized by David Lubell. She'll give a paper on an Algerian site, nearly 9,000 years old, where human burials were re-arranged in the most extraordinary ways, often with the skulls beside the hip bones. Mining skeletons for bones to use for making tools was perhaps part of the reason for this. Next March she’s been invited to a conference in Portugal to mark the 150th anniversary of the first excavation of the Muge Mesolithic burial sites - you could say they are the most important Mesolithic sites in Europe. A couple of years ago in a Lisbon museum, she and David Lubell found a few skulls and bones from that first excavation, and more recently she identified old plaster casts which have turned up in another museum: all this was thought to have been lost since the 1920s. They've now radiocarbon dated charcoal from inside a skull and Mary is working on confirming exactly where it came from. Trying to reconstruct what happened 150 years ago is a long job and the summer is an ideal time to work on that paper. In addition, she's just been invited to give an extended presentation at an international conference on Mesolithic burials in Halle, Germany in September 2013. There’s lots of work to get through in preparation. Besides all that, there is something really hanging over her head – work she promised to do long ago analyzing the teeth from early modern cemeteries in Holland. If it’s not one thing, it will be the other.

David Lubell is hanging around this summer because he's on the program committee for the June meeting at U of T of the Society of Africanist Archaeologists for which he's also chairing a session on new and recent work in the Maghreb that has attracted around 20 papers which he'll then have to edit for publication. He's also trying to get the monograph on his 1970s work in Algeria finally ready for publication -- this involves contributions from a number of people, not all of whom are still with us unfortunately. Peter Sheppard (a former UW student who worked on the project and is now at Auckland) has managed to raise some money to get the manuscripts camera-ready which is a big help. David continues to collaborate with Mary Jackes on various things (see her note) which include both the Toronto conference and the monograph as well as our participation in a Spanish-Portuguese project on the introduction of agriculture to Iberia.