Colleen Morgan is an archaeology Ph.D. candidate in the Anthropology Department at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the first anthropology graduate student at UC Berkeley with a dedicated emphasis in New Media.
Morgan received a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology/Asian Studies from the University of Texas in 2004. She has worked as a professional archaeologist in Texas and California, as well as Dhiban, Jordan, the island of Moloka'i and Catalhoyuk, Turkey.
In 2008, she studied the historical archaeology of Kalaupapa on the island of Moloka’i then went from the tropical south Pacific to the arid deserts of Jordan as part of the 2009 Dhiban Excavation and Development Project, a Faculty Career and Enhancement Project sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
An article in the most recent issue of Newsweek magazine that basically constitutes an invitation to pause in wonder at the fantastic age of the Göbekli Tepe - or "potbelly hill" - site in southeastern Turkey, believed to be 11,500 years old, is a great reminder that, the further back in time an event occured, the easier it is to talk preposterous rot about it.
Professor Edward Banning is a professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto in Canada. He holds a PhD in archaeology from the same institution.
His field research focuses on the Near East, in the Neolithic timeframe – a period when people began growing crops and living in small villages. It lasted from 8500 BC – 4300 BC. Urban life didn’t exist at this time anywhere in the world.
Professor Banning’s fieldwork includes the site of Ain Ghazal in Jordan. He is also director of the Wadi Ziqlab project which excavates and analyzes sites in Northern Jordan.
He is also interested, more generally, in archaeological theory, sampling, measurement and lab work. He wrote a book called The Archaeologist’s Laboratory, which explores these topics.
The STALDAC 2010 conference gathers insights from a number of research areas such as linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, psychology and philosophy on the conceptualisation of space and/or time by humans.
Spatial language and cognition has generated fervent debates in linguistics recently, in particular since the revival of Whorfian ideas regarding the dynamics between languages and cultures. The domain of space has become a prolific source of evidence of both language-specific and universal features reflected in human thinking and speaking.
In some languages speakers speak and think of space using absolute coordinates of east vs. west and north vs. south on a daily basis while other communities use the notions of left vs. right for spatial orientation and communication. Similarly, in some cultures the time scale is vertical, future is upwards and past is downwards, while closer to home, time seems to be a horizontal line, with future in front of us and the past behind. More formal approaches in syntax and semantics provide yet another perspective for representing time in language.
Post-Doctoral Fellow, Dept of Anthropology, Washington State University
Dr. Jodi Barta is a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Anthropology at Washington State University in the United States.
Dr. Barta holds a PhD from McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. While there she conducted bio-archaeology research on the site of Vagnari in southern Italy. Archaeologists have unearthed 70 skeletons at the site so far. Vagnari holds an Imperial Roman estate that produced textiles and iron implements, some of the workers were slaves.
She conducted DNA analysis on the skeletons. Most of the skeletons are from the local area, but one turned out to be very unique. The skeleton’s DNA indicates that he was of East Asian ancestry on his mother’s side. He appears to be the first example of a person with East Asian ancestry found buried in the Roman Empire.
Barta is also doing archaeological research on the Northwest coast of North America where she is looking at dog bones. Dogs existed there before European contact and can provide researchers with clues as to how human lifestyles changed over time.
