Recent
Faculty Activities (2010-2012)
· John Relethford has published the ninth edition of his introductory biological anthropology text, The Human Species: An Introduction to Biological Anthropology, published by McGraw-Hill (2013).
· John Relethford is the author of a new textbook, Human Population Genetics, published by Wiley-Blackwell (2012). This book is an introduction to the study of population genetics, the mathematical basis of evolutionary theory, with specific reference to application to human populations and anthropological questions.
· John Relethford has been appointed to a three-year term on the Editorial Board of American Anthropologist, the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Assocation.
· The New York State Library, Manuscripts and Special Collections, has accepted for its archives the collected papers of William A. Starna (Professor Emeritus, Department of Anthropology, College at Oneonta; Adjunct Professor Emeritus of Geography, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON) and Jack Campisi (formerly adjunct professor, anthropology, College at Oneonta, and Wellesley College). The collection spans the period from 1974 to 2011 and reflects Campisi’s and Starna’s research on and duties as expert witnesses for American Indian land claims, in particular those brought by each of the Iroquois nations in New York State and Wisconsin, and the research for and preparation of petitions submitted by over twenty native communities from throughout the United States for federal acknowledgment as American Indian tribes. In addition, the collection contains materials on Campisi’s and Starna’s historical and legal consultancies related to matters of federal taxation of American Indians and cultural evaluations for environmental damages to native communities as determined by federal courts, and on disputes over treaty rights in the United States and Ontario, Canada.
· John Relethford has been elected Chair-Elect of Section H (Anthropology) of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He will serve one year as Chair-Elect, one year as Chair, and one year as Retiring Chair. Click here for more information from a SUCO news story.
· Tracy Betsinger is coauthor on a paper entitled “Differential visibility of treponemal disease in pre-Columbian stratified societies: Does rank matter?” in the last issue of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology (144:185–195, 2011).
·
John Relethford published
a book review of 99%
Ape: How Evolution adds Up (University
of Chicago Press), edited by J Silvertown in the American Journal
of Physical Anthropology (144:331,
2011).
· Sallie Han presented a research poster, “Teaching Mock Spanish: A Children’s Book and the Circulation of Ideologies of Language and Race,” at the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association in New Orleans, held November 17-21, 2010. At the meetings, Han also represented the editors of the book, Reconceiving the Second Sex: Men, Masculinity, and Reproduction (Berghahn Books 2009), and accepted the Council on Anthropology and Reproduction’s 2010 Book Prize on their behalf. Her chapter, “Making Room for Daddy: Men’s ‘Belly Talk’ in the Contemporary United States,” appears in the prize-winning volume.
· Renee Walker presented a paper at the Annual Meeting of the Southeast Archaeological Conference in Lexington, Kentucky, entitled “The Dogs of Spirit Hill: An Analysis of Domestic Dog Burials from Jackson County, Alabama.”
· Tracy Betsinger recently presented/co-authored three papers at the Annual Meeting of the Southeast Archaeological Conference in Lexington, Kentucky. She presented "Regional Patterns in Oral Health: Are These Cultural Differences?" and co-authored "Location, Location, Location: Mortuary Treatment and Health Status Do Matter in the Tellico, Melton Hill, and Chickamauga Reservoirs of East Tennessee" and "Environmental and Dietary Variation during the Dallas Phase Period in East Tennessee.” The papers reflect ongoing research she is conducting on prehistoric populations from eastern Tennessee.
· Tracy Betsinger is coauthor of a paper entitled “Model of tooth morphogenesis predicts Carabelli cusp expression, size, and symmetry in humans” that was published in the online peer-reviewed science journal PLoS One (5(7): e11844. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0011844, 2010). Click here to access the paper.
· John Relethford was the presenter at a “Science Café” event on “Human Origins” held on May 20 at the West Kortright Centre. Science Cafes (http://www.sciencecafes.org) are informal events where a scientist who provides a brief introduction to the topic and then answers questions and promotes discussion among the audience.
· John Relethford is the author of a chapter entitled “The study of human population genetics” in the edited volume A Companion to Biological Anthropology, ed. by Clark S. Larsen (Chichester, United Kingdom: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 74–87. This book provides an overview of the major areas within biological anthropology today. Relethford’s chapter reviews the history and current status of anthropological studies of genetic variation, with examples looking at population structure, population history, and global patterns of human genetic diversity.
· John Relethford presented a lecture entitled “What Does Human Cranial Variation Tell Us About Human Evolution and Race?” to the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin, April 26. This talk reviewed his work on geographic correlates of human cranial anatomy and their relationship to the origin of modern humans and contemporary human variation. While at UT-Austin, Relethford also gave guest lectures in a graduate course on human/primate evolutionary genetics and an undergraduate class on anthropological genetics.
· Renee Walker attended the Society for American Archaeology meetings in St. Louis, MO from April 14-18, 2010. She presented a poster entitled “Teaching Anthropology as Archaeology in Upstate New York” as part of a symposium on undergraduate archaeology teaching strategies. This poster was co-authored with Cynthia Klink. Dr. Walker also continued to serve as the chair of the Kenyon Fellowship committee for the Society.
· Tracy Betsinger presented and co-authored three posters at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Albuquerque, NM, April 14-18. Two posters were part of an invited symposium entitled, "Bioarchaeology of the Southeastern United States: Current Research on Prehistoric, Protohistoric, and Historic Populations.” The first poster, "From Ritual Use to Dietary Staple: Maize Consumption and Oral Health within the Mississippian period of East Tennessee," examined dietary trends based on gender and status. The second poster, "The Canary in the Coal Mine: Treponemal Disease across Subsistence, Settlement Patterning, and Sociopolitical Changes in Southern Appalachia," focused on factors affecting the prevalence of infectious disease (syphilis), such as status differences. The final poster, "A Comparison of Traumatic Injury Patterns between a Rural and an Urban Population from Medieval Poland," examined how settlement patterns affected the rates of accidental injuries related to activity patterns.
· Tracy Betsinger presented a lecture entitled “Our Violent and Dangerous Past: Bioarchaeological Analysis of Traumatic Injuries in Human Skeletal Remains” in Rochester, NY on April 8, 2010 as part of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) lecture series. The lecture was based on her research with medieval Polish skeletal remains and prehistoric remains from East Tennessee. In February 2010, she gave another talk on behalf of the AIA in Lynchburg, VA, entitled “Bioarchaeology: What the Dead Can Tell the Living.”
· John Relethford published a book review of Darwin’s Legacy: Scenarios in Human Evolution (AltaMira Press), by ST Parker and KE Jaffe, in Reports of the National Center for Science Education (30(1–2):45–46, 2010).
· John Relethford published a paper entitled “Population-specific deviations of global craniometric variation from a neutral model” in the latest issue of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology (142:105–111, 2010). This paper examines variation in 57 cranial measures for over 2,000 human skulls from 22 populations around the world to see how well population differences are explained by geography, climate, and other factors. By and large, cranial differences between human populations fits a geographic model based on our species’ origin and dispersion out of Africa. Deviations from this model show two populations are more different than expected because of cranial adaptation to extremely cold climates, and a third population is less different than expected because of migration history.
· John Relethford gave a lecture entitled “Reflections of Our Past: What Genetics Can Tell Us About History” at Moravian College, Bethlehem PA, on March 24, 2010. This lecture focused on the ways in which genetic data can be used to analyze the history of human populations. Several examples were given, including the geographic correlates of the expansion of modern humans out of Africa in the last 100,000 years, the origin of Native Americans, English admixture in Irish islands, and a general discussion of the difference between genetic ancestry and cultural identity. He also gave a guest lecture in two classes: a presentation of his career as a biological anthropologist in an introductory cultural anthropology class, and a lecture on the “top-10” things people should know about human evolution in an interdisciplinary human origins course.
· John Relethford is a coauthor of the second edition of the textbook Human Biological Variation, published by Oxford University Press. The other authors are James Mielke (lead author), Department of Anthropology, University of Kansas and Lyle Konigsberg, Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois. The text focuses on the data and methods used by anthropologists and geneticists to measure and analyze biological diversity in living humans. Topics include an historical review of studies of human variation, genetic models of variation, variation in genetic markers of the blood, variation in DNA markers, other biochemical variations, body and cranial measures, pigmentation, behavior genetics, and genetic studies of human ancestry and history. The text is for upper-division courses in human variation.
· John Relethford has published a review of the book The Mermaid’s Tale: Four Billion Years of Cooperation in the Making of Living Things, by K Weiss and A Buchanan (Harvard University Press, 2009) in the March issue of American Anthropologist (112:167, 2010).
· Brian Haley has published an article in the Spring 2010 volume of the Society for Applied Anthropology’s journal, Human Organization. The article is entitled “Better for whom? The laborers omitted in Goldschmidt’s industrial agriculture thesis.” The article revisits anthropologist Walter Goldschmidt’s highly influential 1940s research on the social consequences of large-scale versus small-scale agriculture in rural America. For more than 60 years, scholars have failed to note that Goldschmidt excluded seasonal migrant workers from his comparative analysis of a large-farm town and a small-farm town. The restoration of these data reveal that the supposedly more democratic small-farm town excluded more farm workers than the allegedly less democratic large-farm town, thus inverting a major aspect of Goldschmidt’s conclusions. With the data on laborers restored, it becomes evident that the different types of towns were interconnected in a geography of class.
· John Relethford is the author of a book chapter entitled “Race and the conflicts within the profession of physical anthropology during the 1950s and 1960s” in the book Histories of American Physical Anthropology in the Twentieth Century, ed. by MA Little and KAR Kennedy, Lexington Press (207–220, 2010). This paper traces several key developments in the history of physical anthropology over two decades, including Washburn’s famous call for a “new physical anthropology” and changing views on the utility of the biological race concept in the 1960s.
· John Relethford has published the eighth edition of his introductory textbook, The Human Species: An Introduction to Biological Anthropology (McGraw-Hill, 2010).
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