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Several articles by Professor of Anthropology Emeritus Douglas Raybeck have recently been published in a book and journal. He contributed two chapters to Improving College Education of Veterans and two articles to the journal Cross-Cultural Research.

Indiana University Press has just released Associate Professor of  Anthropology Chaise LaDousa’s book, House Signs and Collegiate Fun: Sex, Race, and Faith in a College Town.  The book is based on three years of ethnographic and historical research in which students at  Miami University of Ohio collaborated with LaDousa to explore the ways in which "house signs" such as Liquor Up Front, Poker in the Rear, Plantation, and Crib of the Rib became foci of college culture.

Assistant Professor of Anthropology Nathan Goodale and Visiting Instructor of Anthropology Alissa Nauman, in partnership with the Slocan Valley Heritage Trail Society, were awarded a Columbia Basin Trust Community Development Program Grant.  The award provides funding for research associated with the Slocan Narrows Archaeological Project which also serves as the Hamilton College archaeology field school in British Columbia, Canada.

Four members of the Hamilton faculty were recognized for their research and creative successes through the Dean’s Scholarly Achievement Awards at Class & Charter Day on Friday, May 6. The awards were established in three categories by former Dean of Faculty Joe Urgo in 2008.

Erica Kowsz, a candidate for May graduation from Hamilton, has been awarded a Fulbright Grant to Vancouver, British Columbia,  Canada. She will spend the 2011-12 academic year conducting fieldwork among the Sinixt First Nation in the Slocan Valley. Kowsz will produce an ethnographic film exploring the connections between indigenous conceptions of past, place and identity and how these understandings relate to archaeology.

How has the process of ending a relationship been affected in the 21st century by the introduction of new media in communication? Has what it means to be “broken up” undergone a fundamental change after social networking sites like Facebook introduced the world to an “official” relationship status? These are the questions that author and linguistic anthropologist Ilana Gershon explored in a lecture on April 14.

Ilana Gershon, author of The Break-Up 2.0: Disconnecting Over New Media (Cornell University Press, 2010),will lecture at Hamilton on Thursday, April 14, at 4 p.m., in the Bradford Auditorium, KJ Building. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Professor of Anthropology Charlotte Beck was quoted in the journal Science, in LiveScience, in The Oregonian and in U.S. News & World Report about a study, published in the journal Science on March 4, that raised questions about how prehistoric peoples, upon their arrival from Asia, journeyed south to the Americas. Beck and Professor of Anthropology Tom Jones published a paper in 2010 that concluded that the initial colonization of the intermountain region of the Great Basin was probably by populations from the Pacific coastal area and not, as conventional wisdom holds, from the Great Plains.

Over fall break, a group of researchers from Hamilton College embarked on a research trip to the Slocan Valley, containing one of the few undammed rivers in the Upper Columbia River Basin of Canada’s British Columbia province. The purpose of their trip was to film interviews with local people regarding the presence of aboriginal people in the valley.

Donald Carter, professor of Africana studies, has been appointed chief diversity officer by President Joan Hinde Stewart this summer to “oversee efforts in the area of diversity and help us to build the most inclusive and welcoming community possible.” Carter hopes “to develop a broad diversity plan based on what’s going on today - the problems and successes we are having - and to build organically from the bottom up on what is already here.”