~ Comments and News From our Current Students ~
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Anthropology Students
This page highlights the kinds
of things our current anthropology students are doing.
And they're doing a lot!
Living
with the Kiowa Indians:
Ethnographic Field School, Summer 2004
by
Marcus Ross
This summer
Joshua Harmsworth and I, both Anthropology students here
at Missouri State, participated in the Kiowa Ethnographic Field
School led by Dr. William Meadows, in Southwestern
Oklahoma. There we spent six weeks living among and
studying the Native American communities in and around
the town of Anadarko, north of Lawton.
The
Plains Indian tribes once dominated this area, and
many of their descendants still call Southwest Oklahoma
their home. While there we were able to interact with
and get to know members of many different tribes,
including the
Kiowa,
Kiowa-Apache, and
Otoe, as
well as a few interesting non-Indian characters.
Josh and I were
the only two students to participate in the field
school, which made our workload a heavier one, but it
also gave us a greater opportunity to get to know the
people personally. As opposed to a horde of anthropology students all jockeying for
attention, we were able to work with people on a more
intimate basis.
During our time
in Oklahoma, Josh and I slept
alternatively in an earth lodge and a
teepee. We stayed with the Jennings family
and were privileged to have the opportunity to observe our
hostess, Vanessa Jennings, create fine beadwork during
our visit. Vanessa’s grandfather was Stephen Mopope, a
famous Native American artist.
While there we
were able to meet with several artists and view the
work of many more. We also learned about other prominent
members of the community as well. Such figures include
the late
T.C. Cannon, a revolutionary artist, and Pulitzer
Prize winning author
N. Scott Momaday.
In addition to
interviewing lots of people
(see the picture at left),
we were also given the chance to attend several
important community functions, such as the
Sun Dance, and other events, such as the American
Indian Exposition. There were also several museums to be
seen, including the Native American Hall of Fame and the
Plains Museum, all of which
contained wonderful exhibits.
We were also
able to find the time to visit some local
attractions, such as Mount
Scott and the Wichita Mountains, and we even got to take
in an old-fashioned game of 1800’s-style baseball at the local
military base. We visited some sites of a more historical importance
as well including
Cutthroat Gap, Rainy Mountain,
and Saddle Mountain.
Other
activities included attending local church services, as
well as several hand-games, going to Kiowa language
classes, and eventually performing our own interviews,
unaided. We were given the
chance to view or experience so many aspects of the
Kiowa culture, including numerous occasions for sampling
the cuisine, that we were busy doing something almost
all the time.
Marcus Ross is currently a
member of the Native American Heritage Month
committee at Missouri State. He is pictured
at the top of this article putting his field notes into his
computer.
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Dem
Bones, Dem Bones!
From Dr. Suzanne Walker and her Student
Researchers
As a biological anthropologist, one of my areas of expertise has
become forensic
anthropology. I've always been interested in bones, animal
or human, but after discovering just how much information a
skeleton can yield about the person who once inhabited it,
interest became fascination. First in the coastal redwood
country in northern California (where skeletons turn up in the
woods and on beaches from time to time), and now here in
southwest Missouri, I've been consulted on a number of cases
involving human remains. How old was this person when they died?
Male or female? How tall were they? What was their ancestral
past?
Sometimes the evidence provided by the bones melds itself into
an answer, and sometimes we're frustratingly left with as many
questions as we started with. Such was the case for a skeleton
that was brought to me at the Missouri State
Anthropology Lab in June of this year. When the Texas County
coroner, Tom Whittaker, brought a skeleton to be identified, it
came complete with its own casket. Mr. Whittaker's biggest
concern was that the remains were Native American, in which case
the skeleton would need to be identified as such and then
repatriated, in accordance with NAGPRA (Native
American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act).
Since the casket and some aspects of its contents hinted at an
age of about a hundred years ago, it was quite obvious that we
weren't dealing with a recent homicide. Having recently finished
teaching an intersession course in forensic anthropology, I knew
some students who were hungry for more experience in the area.
I requested permission from the
coroner for them to examine the skeleton as well. Thus it came
to be that four students (Nick Evangelista, Scott Jackson,
Lester Lakey, and Courtney Smith) and
I spent the better part of a Saturday and Sunday in the
Anthropology Lab, taking measurements and recording qualitative
features of the skeleton, with the goal of arriving at some
preliminary indication of who we were dealing with. Its
age? Old. It was one of the oldest skeletons I'd ever seen, with
most teeth (and their sockets) gone or extremely worn, the skull
sutures mostly obliterated from a lifetime of scalp rubbing
against it, and signs of arthritis throughout much of the body.
Male or female? Yes. The skeleton proved frustratingly ambiguous
in terms of features indicative of its sex. Ancestry? Here
also, the bones were reluctant to give up much information.
Human populations differ more within each group than between
groups, and this overlap is part of the reason we can't be
easily classified or categorized. However, some features are
more common in some groups than in others.
For our skeleton, the features fit in best with either African
or American black, or Asian ancestry (specifically Japanese,
according to our forensic anthropology computer program). This
individual may well have been of mixed ancestry. Stature? That
can often be a simple question. Measure the limb bones,
especially the femur (thigh bone), and plug the numbers into a
formula to spew out a height, with some margin of error. The
catch is that limb proportions differ somewhat depending on
ancestry, so we had to widen our margin of error to accommodate
unknown ancestry, making our final answer a bigger range of
possible heights.
Our mystery skeleton is still a mystery, although Lester Lakey
and Courtney Smith carry on the work (see the
article below), collecting more data and conducting more
analyses on the skeleton, looking into the makeup of the
historical populations of Texas County, Missouri, and how the
skeleton may have come to be in downtown Houston. If we find
out, we'll let you know.
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Oh My Aching Bones:
The Life of a Budding Forensic Anthropologist
by Lester Lakey
(pictured at right with
fellow student researcher Courtney Smith)
A major in anthropology requires an interest in
the human experience, whether it is cultural, behavioral,
biological, or social. It is a study of the past and present human
condition. My main area of interest is
physical
anthropology, with a specialization in forensics. Forensic
anthropology has as its basis human osteology
(a branch of anatomy dealing with the bones,
ed.) and applies
this knowledge to obtain facts so this information can be applied to
courts of law whether it is civil or criminal.
Anthropologists specializing in forensics
usually work out of universities or for government agencies such as
a branch of the military. Forensic anthropologists can also
volunteer and possibly get paid to work for NGO’s, or nonprofit
organizations like Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch. This
is the path I’m determined to follow so that what I’ve studied and
learned can benefit humanity in some way. To reach a goal, though,
one has to start somewhere, and currently
Courtney Smith (another Missouri State Anthropology
student,
ed.)
and I are working on our first forensics case,
a skeleton from Houston, Missouri.
This past summer, after taking “A Survey of
Forensic Anthropology” offered by Dr. Walker here on campus, I was
offered the opportunity to examine a skeleton found in a building
usually rented out for cheerleading practice in the small rural town
of Houston, Missouri, in Texas County. Three girls from the
cheerleading squad took a break and ventured to the upper floors of
the building and discovered three coffins. Two of the coffins
contained fake skeletons but the third coffin the girls found an
unmistakably real skeleton. The building itself is normally vacant
and had been previously used several years ago by a fraternal
charitable organization called the Odd Fellows. During the ritual
initiation practices of the Odd Fellows, the new members recite a
passage in the presence of a skeleton (believed to remind them of
their own mortality). Usually, the skeletons that are used are not
real and real skeletons could at one time be ordered through the
mail and are normally bought by medical professionals.
In studying the skeleton, we examined and
inventoried everything available: including all bones, teeth, and
whatever was found with the human remains and noted the condition of
the bones. Eventually, the goal is to obtain the sex of the skeleton
and establish estimation on ancestry and stature. Using my first
case as an opportunity to apply what I’ve learned so far has been a
fascinating experience in learning more about the human condition.
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