University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology

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University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology

Supporting our Museum Community, Worldwide!

05/21/2026

Congratulations to U-M alum Kyra Pazan, assistant professor of anthropology at California State University, Stanislaus, and her colleagues, including UMMAA curator Brian Stewart, who have published a study in Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences on their findings that a rockshelter they excavated in Lesotho (Likonong) was occupied by humans about 242,000 years ago—the earliest sustained human occupation in the region.

Read about the findings and the site in the Michigan News article by Morgan Sherburne:

https://bit.ly/3PWIyzo

Read the open access article by Pazan et al.:

https://bit.ly/4uIxipL

Photo credit: Kristin Cimmerer of University of Toronto, Mississauga, and Kyra Pazan of California State University, Stanislaus, excavate Likonong Rock Shelter in the mountains of Lesotho. Here, an international team of archaeologists from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Lesotho have identified the earliest sustained human occupation in Highland Southern Africa. Image credit: Kyra Pazan, California State University, Stanislaus

04/28/2026

A huge congratulations to UMMAA student Iride Tomažič for successfully defending her doctoral dissertation:

“Metallurgists of the Wetlands: The Role of Intensification of Metallurgy in Transforming Societies and the Environment of the Tisza-Maros Region between 4500 and 1500 BCE“

We are so proud of you and can’t wait to see what comes next, Dr. Tomažič!

04/21/2026

Please join us for our final iteration of our Brown Bag lecture series for the semester this Friday!

Dr. Isabel Yaya McKenzie, Associate Professor of Historical Anthropology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, will be presenting a reassessment of Inka ancestor veneration, arguing that social organization was based on co-residential ritual “houses.”

Date and time: Friday, April 24th, 12:00-1:00 pm
Location: School of Education Building Room 2218.

We hope to see you there!

04/20/2026

Congratulations to Liley Bozard, an UMMAA first-year PhD student, who was awarded the National Science Foundation's Graduate Research Fellowship (GRFP)!

The GRFP is a national award which supports early-stage students who demonstrate the ability to make significant contributions to STEM research and education. This award, which provides three years of financial support over a five-year period, will help Liley continue her education at Michigan and establish her dissertation research in the Central Mississippi River Valley. Her project will primarily consider how Mississippian peoples within the CMV built their cultural worlds, arranged themselves in social landscapes, and established or performed identity.

Congrats, Liley!

04/17/2026

Shoutout to UMMAA Collections Manager, Jim Moss, for his work at Mindanao last summer in the southern Philippines as part of the ReConnect/ReCollect project! The project, funded by the Inclusive History Project, was recently featured in an article written by Anthropology Assistant Professor Alyssa Paredes, who also participated in the trip.

Since 2021, ReConnect/ReCollect is a multidisciplinary collaboration between UM-based archivists, museum curators, and scholars who work to collaborate with local partners in the Philippines to digitize and share archival materials in the UMMAA collections, seeking to restore ethical curatorial practices with communities of origin and advance inclusive and corrective academic work.

Read more about their trip here: https://inclusivehistory.umich.edu/2026/02/22/a-dispatch-from-the-southern-philippines/

04/15/2026

We are thrilled to announce that UMMAA’s Dr. Raven Garvey has won a Guggenheim Fellowship!!

The Guggenheim Fellowship is considered one of the most prestigious awards for individual scholars, artist, writers, and scientists in the United States and Canada.

“Our new class of Guggenheim Fellows is representative of the world’s best thinkers, innovators, and creators in art, science, and scholarship,” said Edward Hirsch, award winning poet and President of the Guggenheim Foundation.

From the Guggenheim press release: “Chosen through a rigorous application and peer review process from a pool of nearly 5,000 applicants, the Class of 2026 Guggenheim Fellows was tapped based on both prior career achievement and exceptional promise.”

To see the full list of the 2026 Fellows, please visit www.gf.org

04/14/2026

Publication alert! Congratulations to PhD candidate, Ian Beggen, on his new article in Quaternary International, titled “Evaluating Outcomes of Survey Methodology Dissimilarity: Understanding Purported Marginality of Environments for Quaternary Foragers Across the Americas.”

His work challenges long-standing assumptions about “marginal” environments by showing how differences in survey methods can skew interpretations of where foragers actually lived and thrived. By reexamining datasets across the Americas, the study argues that what appears to be marginality is often just a product of uneven archaeological visibility, not of past human behavior.

Check it out here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1040618226001576

04/08/2026

Please join us for another iteration of our Brown Bag lecture series this Friday!

Our own Julian Schultz, PhD Candidate, will present on faunal material excavated from the Late Neolithic archaeological site of Lluga, located in modern day Kosova!

Date and time: Friday, April 10th, 12:00-1:00 pm
Location: School of Education Building Room 1322.

We hope to see you there!

04/06/2026

New equipment alert! UMMAA just received new marine coring equipment for underwater archaeology, allowing researchers to collect sediment cores quickly at depths beyond the reach of divers. Amy Socha, a first-year PhD student, is pictured here examining the new system at the Research Museum Center. She will be using this equipment to collect cores for depositional and paleoenvironmental analyses on early Holocene sites in Lake Huron this summer. Stay tuned for the results of this work!

04/03/2026

Congratulations to PhD candidates, Iride Tomažič and Kara Larson, UMMAA curators, Alicia Ventresca-Miller and John O’Shea, and their collaborators on a landmark new article in PLOS One!

The article presents the first isotopic research conducted on Bronze Age diet of the Moriš culture and one of the few isotopic studies conducted in the Carpathian Basin. Drawing on stable carbon and nitrogen isotope data from human and animal remains across four sites, this work tracks dietary practices over an extended period within a single cultural group. Results show minimal variation in human diets, pointing to long-term food stability and consistent access to key resources. Rather than reflecting rigidity, this stability highlights the resilience and adaptability of Moriš communities in the face of environmental and social change.

Check it out here:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0344463

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Website

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