Two Wenner-Grens Announced
The School of Anthropology is proud to present the latest SoA Wenner-Gren recipients, Ashleigh Thompson and Paula Ugalde. Hearty congratulations to both! Here’s a look at their projects.
With the Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, Ashleigh Thompson (left) can begin fieldwork for her dissertation research, which is titled “Gender, Materiality, and Traditional Foodways: Red Lake Ojibwe Food Sovereignty from the 18th Century Forward.” The funding will be used to travel to the Red Lake Ojibwe Nation in northern Minnesota. There, Thompson will work the Tribal Historic Preservation Office’s artifact collection and the Tribe's historical archives, engage in object-based interviews with community members, and participate in the community’s major traditional foodways to better understand the impact of colonization on gender roles and materiality of Ojibwe foodways.
Ph.D. candidate Paula Ugalde (right) received the Wenner-Gren Dissertation Research Grant for her project “Envisioning a Paleoindian communal space: living under the trees in the Atacama Desert, Chile.” The grant will be used to fund her lab work, including radiocarbon dating of preserved tree stumps, analyses of soils and stable isotopes from camelid fiber cordages and bones, and lithic tool characterization. All of these materials come from archaeological sites dated to 13,000–11,000 years ago. Her advisor, Vance Holliday, and committee members, Steve Kuhn, Mary Stiner, and Jay Quade, are collaborators for this project. Fieldwork will be funded by a Chilean project led by Dr. Calogero Santoro. (Anthro News Digest date: 04/23/2021)