Congratulations to Ebenezer for being featured in the Office of the Vice President for Research’s 2022 “Dare to Discover” series of downtown banners!

An anthropological archaeologist, Margaret Beck is continually searching—sometimes physically, for artifacts or geological samples, but always intellectually—to understand how people once lived, how they prepared and served food, taught and learned craftwork, used local resources, moved within their landscapes, and spread their traditions. Currently, she’s studying red-painted archeological ceramics and iron-rich geological samples to discover how Native peoples created and applied the color red in the central United States. The answers aren't always easy to find centuries later.

Growing up in Nigeria, Ebenezer Adeyemi noticed the resource gap between local communities and often wondered what led to this imbalance. Jumping to the present, you will find him working to answer these same questions as he pursues a doctorate in anthropology. Adeyemi is focusing his studies on local and global factors contributing to inequity as well as the ways marginalized communities can advocate for themselves to address – with an emphasis on how they can gain better access to healthcare.

Alejandro Muzzio teaches Anthropology at Howard Community College in Maryland. He was recently awarded for his teaching and has been recognized as an inspiring faculty colleague.

The public has learned much in the early months of 2021 about the medical efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines. But what about how individual patients feel about their experiences receiving a vaccination, and how they talk about it with others?

John Doershuk, State Archaeologist and Office of the State Archeologist Director, will lead the four-week course. Participants will be introduced to the essential methods of field archaeology including artifact identification, site mapping, excavation techniques, artifact processing, and beginning analytical methods. The field school will include lectures on Iowa archaeology and the culture history sequence of western Iowa as well as day trips to the Sanford Museum in Cherokee, Iowa and the Dixon Oneota site, and possibly the Blood Run National Historic Landmark, Jeffers Petroglyphs, and Pipestone National Monument.

Laura Graham has been awarded a SLA Outreach Award in recognition of urgent long-term scholar activist work with A’uwẽ-Xavante of central Brazil, and more recently with the Wayuu of Venezuela.

Elana Buch's book "Inequalities of Aging: Paradoxes of Independence in American Home Care" was just awarded an Eileen Basker Memorial Prize from the Society for Medical Anthropology.

COVID-19 vaccinations are under the microscope – inspiring hope and a possible end to the pandemic, but the rapid production and approval of multiple vaccines can raise concerns from the public.