Undergraduate research at UNCG

Each year, the Undergraduate Research, Scholarship, and Creativity Office here at UNCG hosts the Thomas Undergraduate Research and Creativity Expo, which provides a venue for undergraduates engaged in faculty-mentored projects to present their scholarly and creative work to the university community. This, the 11th such event at UNCG, included over 200 students, four of whom worked with me on various topics:

• I participated in an Ashby Dialogue last year that focused on the use of Social Network Analysis (SNA) in archaeology. As part of that dialogue, I was asked to lead a discussion in my area of expertise, the Paleolithic. I soon discovered that there was, in fact, no example to discuss. So, I downloaded some data and threw it into Cytoscape to see if a SNA approach could provide some insight on social landscapes during the Magdalenian. This time period is justifiably well-known for its beautiful portable art, which provides a rich database of social information. I have since become really intrigued by SNA, and it just so happens that a colleague in the Department of Computer Science, Jing Deng, specializes in social networks. After a couple of informal meetings, Jing and I decided to recruit two undergraduates, one from anthropology and one from computer science, to work with us on a collaborative project. We secured some funding from the Undergraduate Research, Scholarship, and Creativity Office to support Amanda Chase (anthropology) and Nathan Arnold (computer science). While Amanda collected data on Magdalenian artwork, Nathan programmed, from scratch, an application that (1) allows users to upload archaeological data; (2) visualize the location of archaeological sites in true geographic space; (3) calculate the similarity of archaeological artifacts based on artistic motifs; (4) visualize the archaeological sites in "network" space to identify social relationships. Amanda (oral presentation) and Nathan (poster presentation) both did a great job, and Jing and I are currently putting together a grant proposal to secure long-term funding for this project.

• As part of my research at Olduvai Gorge and as director UNCG's Olduvai Gorge Paleoanthropology Field School, I am engaged in a long-term project to document the distribution of bones on modern landscapes. Olduvai lies on the eastern edge of the Serengeti, and I am particularly interested in the factors that influence where bones are distributed in this dynamic area. Ultimately, I hope to apply this information to the fossil assemblages that we are excavating within the gorge itself. In 2015 and 2017, we collected over a thousand bones from two microhabitats: an open, treeless grassland and a wooded area surrounding a seasonal watering hole. Faith Wilfong, who was recently accepted to the graduate program in anthropology at the University of Iowa, attended the 2017 field school and, with funding from the Undergraduate Research, Scholarship, and Creativity Office, helped me analyze these two bone assemblages. Faith found that the open grassland assemblage likely accumulated over decades, which, given how dispersed the bones are, implies that even diffuse scatters of bones require a long time to form through "natural" (i.e., non-human) processes. She also found striking differences in the density and pattern of distribution of bones within the two microhabitats. Bones were much, much more common in the wooded habitat and tended to be distributed most densely under trees. Faith presented these data as an oral presentation at the expo and as a poster at the Paleoanthropology Meetings in Austin.

• Finally, I worked with Ashley Nelson (who participated in the 2016 Olduvai Field School) on an open-access, online paleoanthropology database. The University Libraries here at UNCG offer Digital Partners Grants, which provide library expertise to a faculty member interested in working on a digital project. I was lucky enough to be awarded one of these grants, and I recruited Ashley to help put together a database that cataloged the location and artifact and fossil inventories of paleoanthropological sites. We are working with the extremely capable Danny Nanez, a web applications developer with the University Libraries, to get this database online and available for researchers to not only map paleoanthropological sites but query them based on age, artifact type(s), and the presence/absence of fossils. I hope that this will be a useful tool for researchers, students, and instructors alike. 

I should also point out that another one of our undergraduates, Curran Fitzgerald, working under the direction of our own Donna Nash, won first place for his poster presentation "Archaeoastronomical analysis of Wari ritual spaces in the Osmore Valley, Peru."