Paleoanthropology Society meetings 2018

The Paleoanthropology Society meetings were held in Austin, TX on April 10th and 11th. I'd never been to Austin and, for some reason, I envisioned a sleepy-ish college town, but boy was I wrong...it's big! There were, as always, several really interesting talks, but I was only able to stay for the first day. Also, this post is tardy by several months, so I'll keep it short.

The most important talk, in my opinion, came from Robyn Pickering, who presented an integrated view of U-Pb dates from flowstones in South Africa. Essentially, these things form during wet phases, when water is entering the caves and minerals are precipitating out of it. The fossil-bearing deposits occur between these flowstones, which means that sediment deposition occurred only during dry phases. The fact that hominin fossils are associated with drier habitats, then, appears to be largely an artifact the patterns of deposition within the caves, rather than a true reflection of habitat preferences. The other really fascinating talk involved the 3.6-million-year-old Laetoli footprints. The most famous, of course, is the "G" trackway that preserves the footprints of at least three bipedal individuals. Much less well-known (heck, I had forgotten all about it myself), however, is the "A" trackway originally identified as hominin but later hypothesized to have been formed by an ursid. Ellison McNutt and her colleagues reexamined the ursid hypothesis by convincing several American black bears to walk bipedally through mud. The Laetoli A prints, interestingly, are similar in some regards to bipedally walking bears and chimpanzees. However, the stride width of the Laetoli A prints is much narrower than that seen among bears or chimps, which McNutt et al. interpret as evidence for a pelvic stabilizing mechanism and/or a valgus knee--both of which are only seen in human bipedalism. So, they conclude that while the Laetoli A prints are not modern human in form, they most likely belong to a hominin, perhaps a species that did not utilize a modern human form of bipedalism.   

Our team, with Faith Wilfong as lead author, presented a poster about our ongoing work with modern bone scatters on the eastern edge of the Serengeti. Of particular relevance, too, was a poster from Charné Nel, Jason Heaton, and Colin Menter that provided a taphonomic analysis of baboon carcasses from Misgrot Cave, which is one of the comparative samples my colleagues and I used in our recent PNAS paper.

To wrap up the trip, I had a quintessential taxi experience on the way to the airport. The driver, a really nice dude named Chris, told me all about how he had moved to Austin from New England in the 1970s for college, tried to slip into the music scene, and eventually found himself working for a music shop that built guitars for members of the Rolling Stones. Ah, Austin... 

Society for American Archaeology meetings 2017

This year's Society for American Archaeology meetings were held in Vancouver, British Columbia from March 29th to April 2nd. I flew into town on Thursday night (the 30th) and had to run out on Saturday night. It was a whirlwind trip for me, as I presented a paper, co-chaired a special session, and supervised two undergraduate researchers who also presented at the meetings. As always, there was too much going on to see everything that was of interest, but I'll present my highlights:

• Way back in June 2016 I was invited by Karen Ruebens to contribute a paper to a symposium entitled "Connecting Middle Paleolithic Datasets: the Interplay of Zooarchaeological and Lithic Data for Unraveling Neanderthal Behavior," which was co-organized by Geoff Smith, Theresa Steele, and Tamara Dogandzic. Around that time I was reading an interesting paper by Marie-Cécile Soulier and Eugène Morin about the use of cutmark orientation to reconstruct planning depth in the Paleolithic, and this sparked my interest because, in 2014, we published a paper suggesting that cutmark orientation might be used to identify the skill level of prehistoric butchers. So, I thought the symposium would be a great venue to explore this issue further and I happily agreed to participate. The paper I presented with my colleagues Chris Nicholson, Kevin Covell, Robert Sanderford, Kristen Welch, and Metin Eren "Cutmarks, Lithics, and the Identification of Skill and Tool Utility in Experimental and Middle Paleolithic Contexts," turned out to be slightly different than what I had originally submitted in our abstract (a not unusual situation given that abstracts are due a full seven months, yes SEVEN MONTHS, before the meetings), but our major findings were (1) that inexperienced butchers tend to create more cutmarks and more variation in cutmark orientation than do more experienced butchers and (2) that Levallois flakes (which were produced by Metin, who is a world-class knapper and lithic technologist) are ideally suited to butchery because of their versatility. 

The preparation of cores for the removal of Levallois flakes.
From Eren and Lycett (2012: Figure 1).

While both conclusions are interesting, the latter was of particular note in the context of the symposium, since the creation of Levallois flakes is a labor intensive, not to mention difficult to learn, process (see figure above). Our results suggest that Levallois flakes' utility and durability as butchery implements may partially offset the energy expended to create them. In other words, it might make sense to spend an hour or two preparing cores (and wasting a lot of raw material in the process) if it results in the production of three or four Levallois flakes that can butcher a couple of carcasses without being replaced. I slipped out briefly after our talk to visit the poster session down the hall since my student, Liat Lebovich, was presenting on some landscape taphonomy we've conducted on the savanna just north of Olduvai Gorge, but returned for the symposium's first question break and the remainder of the session. Several questions were thrown my way, relating mainly to the application of our cutmark data to archaeofaunal assemblages (we have not yet taken that step). One interesting query, I believe from Eugène Morin, involved cutmark frequencies: we found that novice butchers produce more cutmarks within each "cluster" (defined by us as a group of cutmarks separated from other groups of cutmarks by at least one centimeter) than do experienced butchers. He asked if I thought that novice butchers would create more, or fewer, cutmark clusters. After thinking about it for second, I responded that while novice butchers create more cutmarks per cluster, they probably produce fewer clusters since the marks they create tend to be scattered across relatively expansive portions of the bone surface rather than the few discrete clusters (that make anatomical sense) created by more experienced butchers. I hadn't thought to examine this variable, and I certainly will do so as we move forward with our study. The rest of the papers were interesting, and the integration of faunal and lithic data is obviously critical to understanding Neandertal lifeways. Very honored to have been invited to participate in the symposium.


• On Saturday morning, I co-chaired a session with my friends and colleagues Tori Johnson and Ryan Byerly entitled "Ecological Perspectives on Hominin Landuse Use during the Early Stone Age of Africa." Included in the session were papers presented by Julio Mercader, Cynthia Fadem, David Braun, Briana Pobiner, and another of my students, Cory Henderson. The session was well-attended (it wasn't a massive room, but most of the seats we did have, perhaps 75 or so, were full). As I stated in my short introductory remarks, the impetus for the symposium stemmed from Rick Potts's "Variables Versus Models of Early Pleistocene Hominid Land Use" manuscript published in Journal of Human Evolution in 1994. In that paper, Potts argued (correctly, I believe) that paleoanthropologists should resist the urge to force early Pleistocene archaeological sites into specific "types," or, using Potts's terminology, models (e.g., Home Base vs. Refuge vs. Central Place). A more productive approach involves the identification of the ecological variables (e.g., the distribution of raw material outcrops, plant and animal foods, competitors, etc.) that influenced where and when early hominins accumulated stones and bones on the landscape. I also made it clear that our purpose in convening the symposium was not to chastise paleoanthropologists for not taking this approach--it is, in fact, relatively common among researchers investigating Early Stone Age archaeology--but, rather, to highlight the latest work being done from this perspective. UNCG undergrad (and recently accepted graduate student to the biology program at Penn State) Cory Henderson summarized the analyses we've been conducting on raw material outcrops in the Olduvai Basin over the past couple of years. Quartzite dominants a majority of the Bed I and Bed II sites at Olduvai, and it has always been assumed that the source of this raw material is Naibor Soit, a set of three closely spaced inselbergs just north of the gorge.

View looking south at one of the inselbergs (foreground) that makes up the
Naibor Soit quartzite outcrop. Photo by C.P. Egeland.

This is not an unreasonable assumption: Naibor Soit is very close to most of the archaeological sites and would certainly have been a conspicuous feature on the landscape, just as it is today. However, Naibor Soit may not have been continuously accessible, especially when a fully transgressed lake Olduvai likely transformed the inselbergs into islands. There are at least two additional sources of quartzite in the basin, Shifting Sand and Naisiusiu Hill, and we wanted to know if hominins were traveling to other parts of the basin to access this type of toolstone. This is not a straightforward exercise, though, because the quartzite from all the sources is macroscopically very similar. We decided to use X-ray fluorescence to determine if the outcrops could be distinguished based on their elemental composition. It turns out that there is considerable overlap, but samples of known origin can be correctly classified with between 36% and 76% accuracy, which is better than random chance (which would be 33%). When we threw some archaeological artifacts from Bed I into the analysis, most (64%) were inferred to have derived from Naibor Soit. However, a couple were a better match for one of the other quartzite outcrops. So, while hominins appear to have used Naibor Soit a majority of the time, they also visited other parts of the basin to acquire quartzite (from Shifting Sand, Naisiusiu or, perhaps, other sources that are currently buried or otherwise unobservable). The ability to tie artifacts to individual outcrops could potentially reveal very nuanced patterns of movement, which is required to rigorously test various models of hominin land-use at Olduvai. The most interesting paper, at least for me, was presented by Dave Braun on behalf of his co-authors Jonathan Reeves and Matthew Douglass and entitled "Behavioral Inferences from Early Stone Age Sites: A View from the Koobi Fora Formation." Every so often archaeologists, particularly those working in the Paleolithic, need to be reminded of the importance of scale: that is, the scale at which we would like to reconstruct behavior and ecological affordances (months, years or, ideally, days) and the scale at which our proxies of these variables actually permit (months, years, decades, and millennia--rarely, if ever, days). Dave provided exactly that reminder within the context of their on-going work at Koobi Fora, Kenya. They point out that archaeologists continue (wishfully, perhaps?) to apply behavioral models suited for temporal scales that are in most cases simply not reflected in the scatters of bones and stones that litter early Pleistocene paleolandscapes. Cynthia presented the latest geoarchaeological data from our ongoing excavations at DK East (Bed I) and BK East (Bed II). Perhaps most important is her identification of several unnamed tuffs within the DK East sequence. Dating these sediments should allow us to increase greatly the chronological precision in the area and, thus, derive narrower age ranges for the numerous fossiliferous deposits and more accurate estimates of sedimentation rates.    

• The session I most enjoyed, and learned the most from, was chaired by Erick Robinson, Robert Kelly, and Nicolas Naudinot and was organized around "The Future of 'Big Data' in Archaeology." An archaeologist's idea of big data (thousands to hundreds of thousands of records) differs substantially from what is typical in computer science (millions and millions of records), but increased computing power and more sophisticated statistical techniques now permit the aggregation and analysis of huge archaeological databases. I recently received a Digital Partners Grant from the UNCG libraries to collaborate on a database for Paleolithic sites, so I was particularly interested to hear about the latest from folks that have been thinking deeply about data and databases. There are a number of open-access databases, some of which I am familiar with and others with which which I am not, including:
• Canadian Archaeological Radiocarbon Database (CARD): a global compilation of 14C dates.
• Ancient Cacao Map: an interactive database for samples of ancient cacao in the Americas.
• ARIADNE: this is a database of archaeological databases spanning many periods and regions.
• The Paleoindian Database of the Americas (PIDBA): a repository of artifact distribution maps and images. 
• The Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA): this site creates interoperability among archaeological site databases in North America. A good friend with whom I attended graduate school, Josh Wells, is one of the senior investigators on this project.  


Some of the major lessons that I drew from this symposium are:
• The longevity of databases is a real issue, since the people who run them retire and the funding that supports them expires.
• There was a lot of discussion about 14C databases. Many people are using them to model demography, for example (the basic idea: more 14C dates for a particular time period = higher population sizes), but the quality of dates remains very difficult to assess. This same issue of data quality applies to many large databases.

• I recently developed an interest in the use of social network analysis in archaeology. In fact, I've begun a collaboration with a colleague of mine at UNCG, Jing Deng, who is a computer scientist that specializes in online networks. We've joined forces to use his technical know-how and my background in archaeology to apply network analysis to the Paleolithic. Our Undergraduate Research, Scholarship and Creativity Office here at UNCG just funded a proposal we put together to build a social network database for the Magdalenian of western Europe with the aid of Amanda Chase (an anthropology major) and Nathaniel Arnold (a computer science major). The Magdalenian is an ideal test case since there are hundreds of well-dated sites with thousands of artifacts suited to the construction of social networks: portable art. The idea is that stylistic similarities reflect some sort of shared social identity, so if we can identify sites with high frequencies of shared artifacts with shared stylistic variants, we may be able to reconstruct social networks. Jing is adept at using social network software to identify important nodes and relationships between nodes. I do not know much about Paleolithic art and how it is categorized, so I sat in on a "Not Just Good to See: Global Perspectives on Scenes in Rock Art" session. While the focus was on rock, and not portable, art, I gained some perspective on how we might organize art into an analysis. Elizabeth Culley, who is a PhD candidate at Arizona State University, outlined an ontology of parietal art from France between 40,000 and 11,000 years ago. I listened closely as she discussed her use of the number of distinct scenes, the number of narrative scenes, the theme of the scenes (e.g., fighting animals), and the number of animals as important features that distinguish various sites. The other paper I was able to listen to, from Melanie Chang of Portland State University and April Nowell of the University of Victoria, discussed the (mis)use of gender binaries in interpretations of Paleolithic art. They show convincingly that many images that are traditionally identified as either male or female are, in fact, quite ambiguous when it comes to biological sex. Much of this "forcing" of images into male or female reflects modern western gender biases. This was pertinent to me, too, because I need to be careful about past interpretations of some of these images, since biological sex would be an important trait to use in the classification of images for social network analysis. The last presentation that I visited related to social network analysis was a poster by William Ridge (University of Illinois at Chicago) on social networks in the Early Bronze Age of the Aegean. What I thought was interesting was his use of geographic distance between sites ("nodes" in social network terminology) as the null hypothesis for further analysis. In other words, all else being equal, one would expect sites that are closer to each other in an absolute geographic sense to have stronger social ties than sites further apart. If the network analysis does not show strong ties between closely spaced sites, then other hypotheses (trade routes, etc.) can be explored. I will certainly use this approach with our own work in the Magdalenian.  

Well, that's it from my notes, great meeting!

Lilly Teaching Conference

I recently received an Online Learning Course (Re)Design grant from UNCG's University Teaching and Learning Commons (UTLC) to upgrade our department's Statistics for Anthropology course for online delivery in the Summer of 2017 (UPDATE 5.10.18. I finally got it online in the Spring of 2018). To help me with this transition, I attended on Online Learning Incubator workshop at UNCG this past June. Expertly facilitated by Brian Udermann, who is Director of Online Learning at the University of Wisconsin La Crosse, I learned a ton about how to put together, deliver, and assess an online course.

UTLC's Coordinator of the Learning Innovations Office, Laura Pipe, then contacted me about joining a group of UNCG faculty that were attending the Lilly Conference on Designing Effective Teaching, held on August 1-3 in Asheville, North Carolina. Boy, am I glad that I accepted the invitation−there were some fantastic presentations, everyone was extremely pleasant, and the meals were outstanding. One of my main goals was to continue learning about online course delivery, but I also took part in a variety of other workshops. As usual, the highlights from my notes:

• The first session that I attended was Taking the Flip: Plans, Tools, and Assessment Strategies for Creating a Flipped Classroom, by Jayme Swanke of Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville. I had heard of a flipped classroom before, but I really didn't know much about it. As Swanke explained it, the "Flipped Triad" consists of: (1) content delivery (readings, online lectures, etc.) outside of class; (2) assessments such as quizzes, either outside or at the beginning of class, to ensure student readiness and/or identify deficiencies in student understanding; (3) creative activities in the classroom that apply the course content. Here is a figure from her presentation:

The Flipped Classroom model. From newlandstandl.files.wordpress.  

This model, because most of the "homework" is conducted in the classroom with the instructor, is supposed to encourage peer-to-peer collaboration, independent learning, individualized attention, and overall engagement. Swanke talked about her experience using this model in her social work courses and found that it works best when organized around themes or units rather than individual topics. She also stressed the importance of clearly defining the objectives for the units and for each class session. Her recommendations for presenting content online were: GoAnimate (for creating animations; not free), CamStudio (for recording lectures; free), and Windows MovieMaker. To ensure and/or assess student readiness, she suggests Socrative for in-class quizzes, Canvas quizzes of the online lectures, and discussion board posts. Finally, for in-class activities Swanke uses discussions, problem-based learning, collaborative learning (VoiceThread, for example, allows students to post audio files to facilitate collaboration), and case studies.

• Sally Blomstrom (Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University) and her colleagues summarized a project whereby student digital literacy is developed and assessed in a communications course through "audio tours." In this case, students choose a fish from a museum collection and record themselves discussing the species's movement from a biomechanical perspective (this is an engineering school, after all). One of the goals is to teach students how to engage an audience with vocal variety and enthusiasm. Blomstrom utilizes Sing&See, which is software designed to analyze singing voices, to actually visualize students' voices. I've had trouble tracking this skill objectively in my own speaking courses, so I was excited to learn about this new tool. Blomstrom had the students take before and after self assessments of their digital skill set and found that many students did notice a significant increase over the course of the project. The most important aspect of assessing this project is, as the presentation's title Using Structured Reflection to Improve Digital Literacy suggests, the formal reflection that students write at the end. This exercise forces students to identify what worked, what didn't, and what they truly learned from the experience. One interesting finding: many students not only became better users of digital tools but recognized the relevance of digital literacy.  

• The first plenary presentation was given by Terry Doyle (Emeritus at Ferris State University) on Understanding How Students Learn: The First Step to Improving College Teaching Practices. Doyle is an advocate of Learner Centered Teaching, and his website is a fantastic (though overwhelming) resource for this approach. He began by asking us, as teachers, to ask ourselves the following three questions about our classes: (1) What do we want students to retain and apply from our classes A YEAR AFTERWARDS? The answer, he says, should guide decisions about content delivery: if you don't expect students to retain and apply a fact or concept for the long term, then it's probably best to spend more time on other things; (2) What can students do on their own, and what can they not do on their own? Information is EVERYWHERE nowadays, and teachers, as experts in their fields, need to concentrate on things that students need our help to learn rather than on things that they can look up and learn themselves; (3) What teaching actions optimize students' opportunities to learn and master course content? There is only so much time, and we want to ensure that this limited resource is being used well. We as teachers are obligated, he contends, to pay attention to and follow where the research on learning takes us, even if it makes us uncomfortable. Ultimately, we can't make informed decisions without knowing how people learn, which is what the bulk of his presentation was about. One thing that resonated with me is that teachers cannot control a whole slew of variables that impact a student's readiness to learn: genes, family life, sleep, stress levels, diet, hydration, and so on. What we can control is our own readiness to teach, the quality of our learning activities, the quality and timeliness of feedback, and accessibility to students. So, what does the research tell us about learning? Well, first of all, it is clear that, to quote Doyle, "It is the one who does the work who does the learning." No work, no learning. It is also becoming increasingly evident that movement (walking, running, or other forms of exercise) encourages thinking and learning. Can't solve a problem? Get up and go for a walk. Attention is also key. When you attend to a task, it physically alters the brain and prepares it to learn. This is why active engagement is so important−it helps maintain attention. Attention is also affected by the type of task (new and unfamiliar vs. old and automatic) and, perhaps most importantly, the relevance or meaningfulness of the task. A learner, in other words, needs a clear rationale for learning something. I think we all know this, and in our classes we try to tell students why its important to learn what we're teaching them. Doyle provides some excellent rationales that apply to any course in any discipline. First, learning how to learn is critical; the rapidity of technological advances and ever-changing requirements in expertise, even within industries, will require people to literally remake themselves, perhaps several times, throughout their working lives. So, students must become life-long learners. Second, most classes teach writing, reading, problem-solving, collaboration, and the like, all of which are foundational skills that help students gain and keep employment. Finally, learned skills help meet survival needs (paying rent, buying food, etc.). There was a lot to digest from the presentation, but it really forced me to think about my teaching actions.

• Steven Benko and Julie Schrock (Meredith College) facilitated a session entitled Redefining Participation: How Well Did You Do? How Much Did I Help? This workshop forced teachers to ask a very important, but often poorly defined, question: What is "good" participation? Like most teachers, I have an amorphous and, usually, presumed idea of what I consider to be good participation. While I consider participation to be important in my courses, to be honest I've never really sat down and thought deeply about the actual "deliverables" of participation, which is a prerequisite to any reasonable rubric for evaluating it. It is not unusual for instructors to informally gauge participation and use that impression to determine if students on the edge are bumped up or down on the grade scale. Most people in the session agreed that participation includes attendance, class preparation (by doing readings or exercises before class), and contributions to in-class discussions, and a balance should be struck between quantity, dependability, and quality. Benko and Schrock designed very detailed rubrics to measure these items. Contribution, for instance, was graded as Novice (did not raise questions about he readings, did not state a position during class discussion), Developing (rarely, i.e., no more than once, contributed), Proficient (occasionally, i.e., at least twice, contributed), Accomplished (regularly contributed), or Mastery (answered multiple follow-up questions, explained a position and provided reasoned justifications). This rubric was implemented through self-assessments. I admit I was a bit skeptical when I first heard this−allowing students to assess themselves? They found, however, that students were surprisingly honest about their participation, or lack thereof, and that the rubric, which was made available to the students, influenced how they prepared for and participated in classes. Importantly, the rubric included and valued behaviors beyond just oral participation, which allowed students who, for whatever reason, are reticent to speak up, to be rewarded for participation. Now, their class sizes at Meredith are no more than about 30 students, which makes it easier for teachers to track participation and thus call students out if needed, so this strategy may not be very successful in larger class settings. They have also used a token system whereby students are given a token each time they participate, with different colors representing different levels of contribution (comment, question, well-developed idea, etc.). Again, probably best for smaller classes. Nonetheless, this highlights the importance of setting clear expectations for participation.

• While online courses permit a good deal of flexibility for learners, there are also a wide range of misconceptions among students about the format: they are easier, they take less time, etc. Saginaw Valley State is now implementing a "Digital Badge" system to encourage students to take an online tutorial to prepare them for the online learning environment. Students that successfully complete the tutorial receive a badge that appears on their Learning Management System profile so that instructors know that they have some background. UNCG has an optional set of modules called Ready to Learn that serves our community in this capacity. (I should point out, too, that online instructors−myself included−assume a level of technological savvy among millennials and post-millennials that often doesn't exist.)

• Nearly everyone acknowledges the importance of team-based learning (i.e., group work), largely because it models the setting in which students will find themselves in the workforce. Students typically dislike these types of assignments, however, largely because they lose some control over their performance and, thus, their grade. The fear, of course, is to be placed in a group with a slacker (or, to use the apparently technical term, "social loafer"). Completely understandable. A round table discussion I attended on Tuesday morning attempted to address this issue through the use of task management applications that track the contribution and workflow of group members. Here is a list of the discussed applications, some of which are free: Asana, Droptask, Trello, Teamweek, KanbanFlow, Meistertask, Freedcamp, Wrike, Teamwork, allthings, Zoho, Realtimeboard,and Stormboard. Several people mentioned that students are uncomfortable outing each other as social loafers, and when they do it is usually when the assignment is ready to be turned in. This puts the instructor in a difficult position when trying to modify grades and assess contribution. Because contributions can be tracked with these applications, it makes it easier for the instructor to identify social loafers early on. Michael Howell from Appalachian State University, who facilitated the roundtable, suggested that instructors take a class session (or shoot a video) to familiarize students with the use of the applications.

• In How to Facilitate Engaging Discussions Using Research-Based Techniques, Kevin Kelly from the Association of College and University Educators provided a number of useful tips for discussions. He first stressed that discussions, just like any other assignment, should have specific objectives, what he called a "mission statement." We should also try to allow students to write down (individually or in groups) their response to a prompt before answering orally, which lets them stew and thus increases the chances of a meaningful response. He also suggested the "Hatful of Quotes" technique. I had never heard of it, but it goes like this: before class, select five or six passages from the text or an article and transfer them to small slips of paper, ensuring that each quote appears at least twice. Once you get to class, have individuals or groups draw a quote and give them several minutes to consider their response. Then, have them share with the class. I might try this one. Ever heard of a "Google Jockey"? Me neither. An example from Marsha Ratzel and Shelley Wright's post on the Voices from the Learning Revolution blog:

I facilitate the discussion by asking questions, while my students Google, looking for the information we need. As they come across links and videos that explain what we're learning about, my students send me links that I add to our Wiki. This process allows us to talk about the information, including how to research and find reputable information.

This example actually made me think of Terry Doyle's point about what students can and can't do on their own. Often times, looking up information is not something they need our help with−it's determining what is reliable (and why) that they need help with.

• The coolest session I attended was run by Michael Meyer, who directs the Center for Teaching and Learning at Michigan Technological University. Meyer, who also teaches physics at MTU, covered Seven Strategies for Seven Principles, the "seven principles" referring to the Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education. While we actually covered more than seven strategies, they were all very interesting. There is a movement among educators towards the integration of technology in the classroom. This is all well and good (I am one of them), but Meyer's first strategy was the use of good 'ole fashioned white boards. In his physics courses, he divides the students (typically 70-80 of them) into groups of three and asks questions that can be answered collaboratively and displayed to the rest of the class. This method works great for graphs, diagrams, and mental maps in addition to traditional true/false, short answer, and multiple choice questions. Nearpod is a cool application that allows you to pose a variety of questions, including "draw-it" questions using a digital whiteboard, to students on mobile devices. If you want to pay a bit, the upgrade also allows the instructor to add "virtual field trips" and to control the screen of other digital devices so that, for example, everyone can be on the same webpage (and not on Facebook). Piazza is a nice (and free) online Q & A platform that allows, among other things, instructor endorsed answers, customizable polls, and full integration with an LMS like Canvas. PhET has hundreds of interactive simulations for STEM concepts, and TagCrowd creates word clouds. A word cloud, I learned, is the number of times a word appears in a section of text and a list with the font size of the word representing its frequency occurrence. This is especially useful when you want to track student responses to a question: put all the responses into a single text, paste it into TagCrowd, and look for patterns in their answers. This can help you identify whether folks are on the right track.

• Lisa Martino, also of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, spoke about online course culture. While the number of online learners is growing extremely rapidly, students continue to struggle with social isolation, coursework confusion, and the lack of teacher presence. Martino highlighted some ways in which teachers can create a culture within their online courses that can help alleviate these challenges, including introduction videos from the instructor, ice breakers for the students, regular office hours (yes, even online), and weekly video announcements. 

• The second plenary presentation was by Claire Major (University of Alabama), who has written extensively on research-based assessments of various teaching strategies. She summarized results from the most recent meta-analyses and found that: (1) Students actually like lectures, as long as they are done well; (2) Knowledge retention in lectures is increased with guided note-taking, frequent in-class quizzing, active learning break-outs, and instructor sign posts (e.g., "I need 500% of your attention, because this concept is important); (3) In terms of information transfer, lecture-only classes are no better than other class models for short-term retention, but fall behind in skill development (critical thinking, for example) and long-term retention; (4) Courses that combine lecture with active learning activities result in higher exam scores that courses using a lecture-only format; (5) Failure rates are higher in courses using a lecture-only format than they are in courses that combine lecture with active learning activities; (6) Students in courses that use discussion outperform the critical thinking (synthesis and evaluation of information) of students in courses that are solely based on lecture; (7) Students who participate in courses with collaborative learning have greater gains in team skills, self confidence, and higher order skills like problem solving than students in lecture-only courses; (8) There is no difference in exam performance between students who participate in games than students in lecture-only courses. She also argued that collaborative learning can be improved by ensuring that the activities have structure, mechanisms for individual and group accountability, and appropriately sized groups (five seems to be the magic number). There is no doubt that games are good motivators for students, but they can also be improved by making them collaborative and including instructor feedback.

• Hands-down the most thought-provoking session was Fostering a Decolonized Education in an Inclusive Liberal Arts Education, hosted by Tiece Ruffin, Agya Boakye-Boaten, Trey Adcock, and Jeramias Zunguze, all of the University of North Carolina at Asheville. It was pointed out that much of the university (and especially K-12) curriculum in the U.S. is biased towards the Western (and, thus, White) tradition of knowledge and knowledge production. They also argued that it is time to "decolonize" education by considering alternative perspectives not only as "window dressing" for universities purporting to be inclusive, but as truly immersive experiences that force educators to step outside their cultural comfort zone. Tiece Ruffin related a story from one of her teacher education courses in which a student attended the Asheville Goombay Festival, which celebrates the African diaspora and Asheville's African American Community. When asked to reflect upon her experience, the student, who was white and raised in rural North Carolina, wrote that she felt extremely uncomfortable and even expressed fear that she would be shot. This highlights the need among teachers for more exposure to diverse cultures (take an anthropology course!!). I would recommend the following articles, both of which speak to this issue in the context of white teachers and black students: What I Learned Teaching Black Students, and White Teachers I Wish I Never Had.             

        

Paleolithic research in the Armenian Highlands and Anatolia

I returned safe and sound from Anakara a couple of weeks ago (an unexpected overnight stay in Terminal 5 at JFK not withstanding) and am happy to report that the trip was well worth it. It was an intimate event, with 14 papers and perhaps 20-30 audience members. Some highlights:

• The first paper was by Amilié Vialet and her colleague M. Cihat Alçiçek, who discussed the Kocabaş skullcap. I was particularly interested to hear this talk, as I knew next to nothing about this important hominin fossil. The remains consist of the frontal and parietal of a hominin that were recovered in 2002 during quarrying activities in the travertines of the famous Pammukale (Turkish: "Cotton Castle") hot springs (and UNESCO World Heritage Site) in western Turkey. (I actually visited this area, which also includes impressive ruins from Greek and Roman times, on a vacation way back in 2001.) The top of the skullcap was literally shaved off by heavy equipment (unfortunately, the rest of the skull, nor any other part of the skeleton, have ever been recovered) but, thankfully, the recovered bones were brought to the attention of Alçiçek, who recognized their importance. John Kappelman and his colleagues had previously published on the remains and suggested that (1) they dated to ~500,000 years ago, (2) provisionally, they represented H. erectus; and (3) the individual suffered from the earliest known case of tuberculosis. Vialet (who, apart from being a world-class paleoanthropologist, is a genuinely nice person) summarized more recent work on the fossil. Perhaps most importantly, they push back the age of the remains using a variety of dating techniques to ~1.4 million years ago, which makes them among the oldest in all of Eurasia. An audience member asked Vialet about tuberculosis, and she vacillated, saying that a confident diagnosis from their team would need to await further analyses. Their 3D reconstruction of the cranium, however, suggested a closer affinity of Kocabaş to Homo ergaster fossils from Africa rather than early Homo (including the crania from Dmanisi) fossils or later, classic Homo erectus populations from Asia. Vialet suggested, then, that Kocabaş represents an "expansion [from Africa that is] different from that represented by the Dmanisi fossils". It is becoming increasingly clear that the movement out of Africa by hominins ca. 2 million years ago was a complex series of events (emphasis on the plural) that involved many populations, some of which were able to establish long-term occupations and others that quickly went extinct. The new information from Kocabaş certainly reinforces this idea.
• What followed was a series of papers by our Turkish colleagues that summarized the Lower and Middle Paleolithic of Anatolia. What struck me is that apart from a few notable exceptions (Kaletepe Deresi 3, Karaïn Cave, Yarımburgaz Cave, and Üçazğlı Cave), much of what is known is based almost exclusively on surface assemblages that lack key contextual information (chronometric dates, paleoenvironmental reconstructions, etc.). For example, Kadriye Özçelik reported on surface surveys that documented for the first time the presence of Paleolithic material in the Denizli Basin of southwestern Anatolia (this is the same region in which the Kocabaş fossil was uncovered). It is quite amazing, if you think about it, that it took until 2014 to officially recognize the presence of Paleolithic tools in this region, especially since, as I later learned, handaxes have been known in Turkey since 1896. While those of us working in Armenia faced a similar situation−that is, a dependence largely on surface finds−a great deal of progress has been made on this front in the last 10 years, due largely, I think, to the support of the Armenian Academy of Sciences, which has done much to nurture Paleolithic research in Armenia. My conversations with Turkish researchers revealed that it is extremely difficult to acquire permits to even examine and collect surface assemblages in Turkey, much less excavate stratified sites. Until that changes, I fear that our knowledge of Paleolithic settlement in modern Turkey will continue to lag behind that of other nearby countries.
• Our paper summarized work on Bagratashen 1, and we officially announced OSL dates from the Middle Paleolithic horizon of around 35,000 years ago. While Middle Paleolithic sites of this age are not unusual, the types of stone tools uncovered from the deposit look like artifacts from other parts of the southern Caucasus and the Levant that are much older, somewhere around 150,000 to 200,000 years ago (see my previous post on Bagratashen 1 here). So, either our dates are way out of whack (which is possible), or we have an example of technological convergence where culturally and temporally unrelated hominin groups independently converged on similar tool types. There is a long history in archaeology of viewing stone tools to track human populations. That is, particular cultures made particular types of tools, so if you find similar tools, you have the same people. However, folks have long pointed out that, as complex a technology that lithic manufacture can be, there are only so many ways that one can reduce a chunk of rock into different shapes. Dan Adler and his colleagues made precisely this point in their paper about their excavations at Nor Geghi 1 in Armenia. What they found is that at about 330,000 years ago, folks in Armenia were creating both bifacial artifacts typically associated with the Acheulean and Middle Paleolithic Levallois products at the same time. This shows definitively that, at least at Nor Geghi 1, making Acheulean bifaces has little to do with being part of an Acheulean "culture" that represents a particular group or species of hominins. Likewise, it seems that the appearance of Levallois technology, again at least in Armenia, need not necessarily represent a new group or species of hominin. Perhaps it is time, as Dan simulated with a humorous slide, to flush many of these stone tool "cultures" down the toilet.

I should also point out that Phil was able to bring together Turkish and Armenian researchers to discuss Paleolithic archaeology. This shows the power of science in general, and archaeology in particular, to transcend political and ethnic enmity and bring together people with common goals. I was honored to be part of such a momentous event.

Society for American Archaeology meetings 2015

I attended the 2015 meetings of the Society for American Archaeology in San Francisco this past April (yes, again I am behind in my posts). Although I wasn't able to stay for the whole event, I did get a chance to see some really great talks. We presented a couple of posters on our recent work at Olduvai Gorge as well. As usual, I'll present the highlights from my notes:

• Paul Goldberg and his colleagues provided some new geoarchaeological results from the important Paleolithic site of La Ferrasie (Dordogne, France). The Middle Paleolithic deposits at La Ferrasie, which date to between 90,000 and 45,000 years ago, represent one of the most important, and continuous, MP sequences in western Europe. Even more critically, several partial Neandertal skeletons were recovered from the site, most of them in 1909. One thing that I learned is that the cave is actually made up of two distinct areas, an eastern and western, both of which, as Goldberg and his colleagues showed, with different formational histories. What is more, the artifacts found within the cave's sediments were likely originally discarded somewhere else and only later washed in to their final location. Goldberg also talked a bit about La Ferassie 2, which is the partial skeleton of an adult whose exact provenience and age was still poorly understood. Although they were unable to relocate the exact find spot for this individual, they sampled some sediments from the original foot (currently housed in the Musée de l'Homme) and were able to match them to the sediments from their Layers 4-5, which are dated to around 45,000-50,000 years ago.
• Probably the most fascinating talk that I saw was given by Thomas Morgan and his colleagues entitled "The social transmission of Oldowan lithic technology." They conducted an elegant experiment in which novice knappers were permitted to learn Oldowan lithic technology in one of four ways: (1) through reverse engineering (that is, by looking at finished products); (2) observation only (that is, by watching someone else create flakes without the benefit of active teaching); (3) simple, "ape-like" teaching; (4) gestural teaching only (that is, being taught by an expert with gestures but no words); and (5) with fully verbal teaching. The results showed that novices created more, and more useful, flakes with the benefits of teaching, particularly verbal teaching. What intrigued me was that there was no evidence that observational learning was any better than reverse engineering. So, apparently, watching someone is no better than simply looking at finished products.
• I attended a really fun session in honor of the 20th anniversary of the publication of Robert Kelly's "The Foraging Spectrum", which is a landmark book in the study of hunter-gatherers. Nick Conard and Britt Starkovich humorously critiqued the behavioral ecological approach championed by Kelly through, among others things, references to Jerry Garcia (you had to be there). Raven Garvey and Robert Bettinger presented a fascinating case study of two hunter-gatherer groups that, despite living in very similar environments (the subarctic and subantarctic), exhibited very different levels of technological complexity. They argued that culture, and the density of social networks in particular, encouraged (or discouraged) the invention, adoption, and spread of ideas. Thus, for them, ecological and adaptive factors can only go so far in explaining hunter-gatherer diversity. Mike Cannon and David Meltzer offered a mathematical model to explore foraging options when resources become limited. They asked, essentially, when, and under what circumstances, will a group of hunter-gatherers either (1) move on to use familiar resources elsewhere or (2) stay put and learn how to exploit new resources. The highlight of the session was, of course, Bob Kelly's reflections on writing the book. His story about the genesis of the title was especially interesting: he had decided on a title (I can't remember what he said it was now) but the Smithsonian Press had asked him to change it to something more catchy. He told this to his wife, who was flipping through a magazine at the time, and she came back with "Why don't you call it the 'Foraging Spectrum'"? The rest is, as they say, history!
• Mathieu Lejay and his colleagues presented some data on Aurignacian-aged fireplaces from France. What I found interesting (and it makes sense once you think about it) was that their experimental work showed that bone-fed fires tend to be more bioturbated than wood-fed fires because of the increased organic content.

Overall, a really enjoyable meeting...

Osteology in the Carolinas 2

Here's another post from my backlog. In February of 2014, I attended the first Osteology in the Carolinas meeting. This year's event was held on February 7, 2015, hosted by UNCG, and organized by our own Bob Anemone. Twelve papers were given, and there were around 20-30 attendees, some from as far away as Virginia and South Carolina. Another set of really interesting papers, one of which was given by a UNCG anthropology undergraduate, Alexa Uberseder (great job, Alexa!) on our work at Olduvai Gorge this past summer. Some snippets from my notes:

• Gwen Robbins Schug (Appalachian State) focused on re-imagining the idea of social collapse, a theme made very famous by Jared Diamond's 2005 book "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed." In that book, he cites examples of past societies that apparently outstripped their resources and thus collapsed. Gwen made the point that "collapse" may not be the best word, as a detailed examination of the archaeological record indicates that when societies undergo dramatic changes, significant reorganization usually occurs, but the cultural framework remains intact. In fact, what often happens, as her work among South Asian prehistoric sites demonstrates, is that people decide to either remain in cities or move to more rural settings. The latter typically results in a signature that can be misunderstood as a total collapse of society.  
• Megan Perry (East Carolina), who spoke at least year's meeting, and one of her graduate students, Kathryn Parker, both gave talks on attempts to identify the origin of people living in Byzantine and early Islamic times in the Middle East. By assessing the isotopic signatures in food items or geological formations on the landscape, it is possible to determine where people did most of their eating and to track trade routes.
• David Hines (University of Florida and Regime Crimes Liaison Office Mass Graves Investigation Team) summarized some recent work on extracting DNA from skeletons in mass graves in associated with ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. Interestingly, they found that some bones are better for producing DNA profiles than others (as it turns out, the pelvis and femur work best).
• The last talk for which I took detailed notes was by Ashley Gosselin-Ildari (Duke University), who spoke about the use of clickers in large, introductory biological anthropology courses to encourage active learning. This was interesting, and timely, since I started using an on-line Student Response System (SRS) called Socrative to achieve the same goal. I am looking forward to hearing the student reaction at the end of the semester.

Overall, another enjoyable get-together...

Osteology in the Carolinas

I attended the first meeting of the Osteology in the Carolinas Interest Group (OCIG) this past Saturday (2/8). The event was organized by Gwen Robbins Schug (Appalachian State) and Dale Hutchinson (UNC-Chapel Hill) and was held at UNC-Chapel Hill. The purpose of the group is to be "a gathering focused on the analysis and interpretation of human skeletal remains from contexts pertinent to bioarchaeology, forensic anthropology, and paleoanthropology." In his introductory remarks (after showing off a hilarious t-shirt ode to syphilis), Dale noted that most researchers with these interests often fall between traditional disciplinary boundaries, so the group was meant to fill that gap.

Thirteen papers were given, and I would say that there were between 20-30 attendees. I was only able to stay for part of the morning session, but those papers that I did see were very interesting. Some snippets from my notes of the meeting:

• Chin-hsin Liu (Appalachian State) presented on the bioarchaeology of Bronze and Iron Age burials from Thailand. It was nice to hear from an area and time period about which I know almost nothing. Chin-hsin did say that many of the skeletons could not be analyzed in detail since they are left exposed by the state for tourism. Isotopic data indicate that populations tended to eat more-or-less the same diets even as they experienced a number of techno-sociological changes from the Bronze to Iron Ages.
• Sara Juengst, a PhD student from UNC-Chapel Hill, spoke about her research in the Titicaca Basin of Bolivia. She discussed how strontium isotope data can be used to identify the geographic area where individuals grew up and lived. Using this data, she found that a couple of the analyzed burials contain "non-local" individuals that were, perhaps, she suggested, pilgrims from other regions.
• Chuck Hilton, our colleague at UNCG, gave a really interesting talk on his research with human remains from Alaska. Essentially, he is interested in tracking skeletal changes associated with the shift from caribou- to whaling-based subsistence economies among Alaskan foraging populations a couple thousand years ago at a site called Point Hope. Chuck noted that data on the skeletal health of forager populations tends to be limited, as they are highly mobile and do not typically produce large cemeteries. Luckily, there are around 400 skeletons from this site, and Chuck found, intriguingly, that the folks practicing whaling were much less healthy than the earlier, caribou-hunting, people. Tuberculosis was especially prevalent in the former population (Chuck suggested that this could be linked either to increased marine mammal consumption or contact with infected NE Asian populations). The question becomes, of course, if whaling had such negative repercussions for health, why practice it? I was wondering if this isn't an example of costly signaling−whaling is, after all, a dangerous and, as Chuck put it, "boom or bust" proposition, so perhaps the individuals that engaged in it gained added prestige (and, thus, mating opportunities). I'll have to get his take on this.
• Megan Perry (East Carolina) talked about her team's work at the very famous site of Petra (you may recognize the picture below from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade−this is the city's treasury building). Orthodox thinking tells us that as a large, cosmopolitan urban center, Petra would have been ridden with diseases. However, preliminary analyses of the human remains suggests a surprisingly healthy population, and Perry and her team plan on testing this hypothesis further. 

  

  The treasury building at the ancient Nabataean city of Petra (courtesy of UNESCO).

• The last talk that I was able to hear was from Dan Temple (UNC-Wilimington). He was looking at human life history trade-offs with a collection of Jomon skeletal remains. Some background: bodies only have so much energy to delegate to various tasks like growth, maintenance, and reproduction, and life history theory is interested in understanding how the body uses these limited resources. Almost all individuals undergo some sort of stress early in development (low birth weight, disease, etc.), and human physiology is plastic enough to devote extra energy to combat these. The question is how does this impact the rest of an individual's life? Temple tested two models: (1) that these early stressors actually better prepare individuals for other setbacks later on; and (2) that the extra energy used early on in development actually makes those individuals more susceptible to later insults (a "borrow now, pay later" sort of idea). Using linear enamel hypoplasias, which are imperfections in the formation of tooth enamel that reflect episodes of stress, Temple found that those individuals affected by hypoplasia earlier on in their lives had more pathological conditions later on and lower life expectancy. This supports the "borrow now, pay later" hypothesis.

There were a number of other talks that I'm sorry I missed, including our department head, Bob Anemone, who talked about his predictive geospatial modeling, Steve Churchill (Duke), who discussed new hominin discoveries in South Africa, and Mark Teaford (High Point University), who talked about the latest in dental microwear. Looking forward to attending this get-together in the future.