To book a live or taped interview with Fred Wendorf in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call News and Communications at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.
The work of SMU archaeologist Fred Wendorf was featured in the Sept. 8, 2010, edition of The Taos News. Fred Wendorf is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at SMU and the author of Desert Days: My Life as a Field Archaeologist, as well as more than 30 other books.
In 1987, Wendorf became the first SMU faculty member elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
The article Dr. Fred Wendorf leads off UNM-Taos/SMU lecture series retells Wendorf’s contribution to preserving the history of Ft. Burgwin as one of the founders and then director of what eventually became SMU-in-Taos.
EXCERPT: By Tempo staff
History is beneath our feet all over the Taos area, but progress is a constant threat to maintaining this legacy. If it wasn’t for the scientific mind of people like Dr. Fred Wendorf, who knows what the Pot Creek area might look like today? Wendorf is planning to deliver a free lecture titled “Discovering Fort Burgwin” Wednesday (Sept. 8), 7 p.m., at the Taos Community Auditorium, 145 Paseo del Pueblo Norte.
Wendorf’s lecture kicks off the second annual Fall Lecture Series, a 10-week succession of events focusing on the art, history and culture of the Taos area. The lecture series is brought to you through a partnership between Southern Methodist University-in-Taos and University of New Mexico-Taos, the town of Taos and Taos Center for the Arts. All lectures are free and open to the public.
In the lecture, Wendorf “unlocks the history embedded in the artifacts found at Cantonment Burgwin,” a former pre-Civil War-era U.S. Army post south of Ranchos de Taos on State Road 518. Central to fort’s contemporary birth and development is Wendorf, whose book (with James E. Brooks) titled “The Ft. Burgwin Research Center” (2007 Southern Methodist University) tells the story.
SMU is a private university in Dallas where nearly 11,000 students benefit from the national opportunities and international reach of SMU’s seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
Can a manufacturing industry purr along without a class system of managers and workers? That’s part of a longtime mystery that may soon be solved: How did a prehistoric, egalitarian people called the Hohokam produce large quantities of decorated ceramic vessels without a “manager” hierarchy?
Archaeologists from Southern Methodist University in Dallas and the Cultural Resource Management Program of the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona have launched a unique research partnership to solve the puzzling mechanics of the large-scale industry.
The vessels were made in about 1000 A.D. by a culture archaeologists call the Hohokam. The ancient people used the pottery for daily serving, storage, and social and religious gatherings. Today’s Gila River residents, the O’odham, are descendants of the Hohokam.
Book a live interview
To book a live or taped interview with Sunday Eiselt in the SMU Broadcast Studio call News and Communi- cations at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.
The National Science Foundation is funding the research with a $134,636 grant.
Unprecedented partnership
Under the landmark research partnership, the tribe and SMU hope to decipher the mechanics of the Hohokam ceramic technology and manufacturing techniques.
The three-year project examines artifacts and ceramic production materials from 12 sites in the Sonoran Desert just south of what is now Phoenix, according to archaeologists and co-investigators Sunday Eiselt and J. Andrew Darling. Eiselt is director of the SMU-in-Taos Archaeological Field School and an SMU assistant professor in the SMU Department of Anthropology. Darling is director of the O’odham tribe’s Cultural Resource Management Program.
The analysis looks at a slice of time from 1000 A.D. to 1070 A.D. when production of the decorated ceramic pots, known as “red-on-buff,” was at its peak, said Eiselt and Darling.
Ritually regulated or a managerial elite?
The researchers will probe how a prehistoric society that was fairly egalitarian, without cities or strict social classes, was able to mass-produce ceramic pottery, Eiselt said.
The pottery was critical to a complex system of water management devised by the Hohokam. They used hand-dug canals to irrigate thousands of miles of desert, making the land suitable for growing a wide variety of farm crops.
As pottery specialists living along the middle Gila River, the Hohokam produced and perhaps traded thousands of vessels to the entire region in return for agricultural commodities from surrounding groups, according to the researchers.
“With production output at the level suggested by the millions of sherds and vessel fragments recovered from archaeological sites of this period, we would expect to find political hierarchies, craft specialists, guilds and mass-production techniques,” Eiselt said. “In this situation that wasn’t the case. The results have the potential to show that highly productive craft industries can occur in the absence of managerial elites.”
Hierarchical forms of management for mass-production are more familiar in the non-Indian world, Darling said.
“It’s been postulated by archaeologists that stratification and ranking can be superceded by alternative approaches to production in quantity,” Darling said. “That’s particularly true for societies whose traditional beliefs are not ruled by the bottom line or production and demand.”
Which theory is right?
Eiselt and Darling said the current study will test two competing hypotheses by probing the organizational principles and capacity of core Hohokam technological systems:
The first proposes that a number of villages were producing ceramics independently and trading them for agricultural products — such as cotton — to outside consumers.
The second proposes that ceramic manufacturing was highly concentrated in one or a few villages that were supplied with raw materials by other villages. That implies a greater level of inter-village coordination to create greater economies of scale at the expense of emerging settlement hierarchies.
“The competing hypotheses will be tested through geochemical and petrographic examination of raw materials and ceramic artifacts in order to determine how the Hohokam achieved such great economic and production success,” Eiselt said.
Petrographic thin-section analysis and chemical assays will target the components of red-on-buff sherds — including clay, temper and paint — to identify and characterize raw material sources and reconstruct patterns of ceramic manufacture, the researchers said.
The mineralogical and chemical composition of raw material from different geographical sources will be compared to ceramics from sites across the region.
“This will enable us to map the circulation of raw materials, not just finished products, and thereby identify, geochemically, not only resource trade, but the segmentation of tasks among producer communities, in so far as that existed,” Eiselt said.
From there the researchers can test whether ceramic manufacture for exchange was concentrated at independent centers, or whether there was a division of labor in the production and distribution of raw materials that was part of a broader system for enhancing production efficiency. It will also show whether or how the productive system connected with regional exchange or nascent market systems.
Building on existing Gila research
The project is part of the community’s efforts to recover information from archaeological sites impacted by centuries of development, said Darling. Work will take place on the Gila River Indian Community Reservation under the oversight of the Cultural Resource Management Program.
Results will aid the Pima-Maricopa Irrigation Project, an ongoing effort to restore water resources that were historically lost to the O’odham — previously called Pima — through diversion and damming, Darling said.
The research project builds on earlier fieldwork conducted by the Gila River’s tribal archaeology program. The tribe, in turn, hopes to benefit from SMU’s archaeological expertise, Darling said.
“This is building the tribe’s capacity to conduct scientific research on its own,” he said. “Through collaborative research projects with SMU the tribe is able to exercise its sovereignty in the areas of intellectual research and academic development — not just to inform the world, but to restore the past to the community for their benefit and for future generations at Gila River.”
Both entities benefit, Eiselt said.
“The Gila River Indian Community is investigating the past within the confines of its community with its own team of cultural resource specialists and highly trained archaeologists,” Eiselt said. “It is a rare privilege for SMU to collaborate.” — Margaret Allen
Immigration has sparked a raging national debate about that question — including in the Dallas suburb of Farmers Branch, Texas, the first U.S. city to adopt an ordinance requiring renters to prove they are legal residents.
Contrary to what many believe, however, race isn’t the only driving reason that some white, middle-class people feel threatened by immigrants, according to a new analysis by anthropologists at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
Some white, middle-class people also perceive immigrants who are settling in their suburban communities as a threat to their class status and to their very identity as Americans, say anthropologists Caroline B. Brettell and Faith G. Nibbs.
Immigrants — with cultures and traditions different from white suburbanites — are viewed by some as an assault on long-standing symbols of American nationality, the researchers say. Those symbols include middle-class values and tastes, and the perception that Americans are patriotic and law-abiding, say the researchers, both in the SMU Department of Anthropology.
Caroline Brettell
Faith Nibbs
“For many whites, American identity is wrapped up with being suburban and middle class, and when they see immigrants changing their communities and potentially threatening their class status, they react with anti-immigrant legislation,” says Brettell.
Class and culture
It’s true that for some whites, immigrants can represent competition for economic security and scarce resources, say Brettell and Nibbs — but in the suburbs they are also seen as a threat to the white, middle-class concept of “social position.”
Because of that, Brettell and Nibbs argue for greater attention to class and culture in the study of contemporary immigration into the United States.
The anthropologists base their conclusion on a close analysis of Farmers Branch, a suburb of almost 28,000 people. Farmers Branch made news in 2006 as the first U.S. city to adopt an ordinance requiring that apartment managers document tenants as legal residents.
For their analysis, the researchers looked at newspaper articles and blogs, conducted a lengthy interview with a key City Council member, carried out background historical research and analyzed U.S. Census data.
The research has been accepted for publication in the journal International Migration in an article titled “Immigrant Suburban Settlement and the ‘Threat’ to Middle Class Status and Identity: The Case of Farmers Branch, Texas.”
Flooding into suburbia
New immigrants to the United States are settling in major gateway cities like Dallas and making their homes directly in middle-class suburbs, say Brettell and Nibbs.
These suburbs — once called the “bourgeois utopia” where middle-class values triumph — are populated by white people who decades before fled the central cities to escape poor housing, deteriorating schools, and racial and ethnic diversity, the researchers say.
But when immigrants and white suburbs mix, the result can be explosive — as in the case of Farmers Branch. Whites view their hometown changing. And the changes feel very foreign to them — new religious institutions, ethnic strip-shopping malls, signs in languages other than English, and bilingual programs for education, health care and law-enforcement programs.
“Free and white”
The historic roots of Farmers Branch lie in a land grant designed to draw “free and white” inhabitants to the area in the 1850s, say the researchers.
Farmers Branch grew to 17,500 by 1970, and at that time there were 320 Hispanic surnames in the city. By 2000, however, the Hispanic population had grown to more than one-third of the total. By 2008, Hispanics were the largest demographic group, with 46.7 percent of the population.
Today, like many such cities, Farmers Branch sees its minority, elderly and low-income population growing faster than the national average, say Brettell and Nibbs.
The number of owner-occupied homes in Farmers Branch has fallen dramatically, from 87 percent in 1960 to 66 percent in 2000. Raw median income in 2000 was below what it was in 1970 dollars, adjusted against 2008 dollars, say the researchers.
“If you are a family with options, would you move into this neighborhood if presented with these figures?” asks Mayor Tim O’Hare in the journal article. O’Hare led the fight for the renter’s ordinance.
“Rule of Law”
Brettell and Nibbs say that white suburbanites have also invoked the “Rule of Law” in Farmers Branch and elsewhere.
“As the formulation of laws and their enforcement are disproportionately unavailable to ethnic minorities, and completely inaccessible to undocumented immigrants, the principle of Rule of Law has become a convenient weapon for the Farmers Branch middle class in their fight for status and the status quo,” say Brettell and Nibbs in the article. “Add to this a bit of the legacy of Texas frontier mentality and patriotism and you have a line drawn in the sand by those who stand for the Rule of Law as something absolutely fundamental to American identity and hence perceive illegal immigrants as a threat to that identity.”
In that way, the “Rule of Law” is a tool to exclude unauthorized immigrants and attempt to legislate a certain quality of life, such as English-only communication, as well as proof of citizenship to rent a dwelling, apply for food stamps or get school financial aid, say the researchers.
“Everyone is looking at race but not at class in the study of immigrants, and particularly in anti-immigrant backlash,” Brettell says. “We add to this literature the analysis of ‘Rule of Law’ as a newly rhetorical device that excludes illegal immigrants. Our article offers a new way of looking at this issue.”
Caroline B. Brettell is University Distinguished Professor in the SMU Department of Anthropology and Faith G. Nibbs is a doctoral candidate at SMU. — Margaret Allen
An abused woman who seeks medical help may recover more quickly if health care providers understand her culture, and her social and economic background, says Nia Parson, a medical anthropologist in SMU’s Department of Anthropology.
How can mental health providers best help an abused woman who is a Mexican immigrant?
Scant research has been done to answer that question, Parson says, even though in Texas 39 percent of Hispanic women report experiencing severe abuse. For that reason, the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health in Austin has awarded Parson a one-year, $15,000 grant to examine the mental health care needs of Mexican immigrant women who have sought help after abuse by a boyfriend or a husband.
Abused suffer depression, PTSD, chronic ailments
Nia Parson
Abused women suffer not only physical injuries, but often develop other ailments as well, such as depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and chronic headaches and backaches. They may seek treatment for those problems in emergency rooms, or public or private clinics.
Delivering care in a way that takes into account a person’s cultural and socio-economic background is termed “cultural competency.” However, medical anthropologists have pointed to the need to move beyond notions of culture that are static, stereotypical, and politically and economically without context.
“It is important to recognize the particular situations of abused women who are immigrants and the specific kind of challenges to their recoveries from the abuse, such as a lack of social and family networks, unfamiliarity with social service systems, language barriers and fear of deportation. It is also crucial to examine diversity of experiences within groups, which this research will also do. Not all Mexican immigrants come from the same backgrounds and share the same experiences,” Parson says.
Racial and ethnic minorities are less likely to receive needed mental health services and are more likely to receive lower quality care, according to research cited by the Office of Women’s Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in its report “Action Steps for Improving Women’s Mental Health.” The report — based on the landmark “Mental Health: A Report of the Surgeon General in 1999” — calls for expanding cultural competence across mental health research, training and services. The report also calls for more gender and cultural diversity in mental health academic research and medicine.
Cultural competency could benefit Hispanics and other minorities, according to the 2009 “National Healthcare Disparities Report” by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. According to the report: “Culturally and linguistically appropriate services can decrease the prevalence, incidence, severity, and duration of certain mental disorders.”
The Hogg Foundation in 2005 declared cultural competence one if its priority funding areas. Stating that more than half the population of Texas is ethnic and racial minorities, the foundation says its goal is to increase the availability of effective mental health services for people of color.
Parson already has done some research on cultural competency. In a 2006-07 study of Spanish-speaking immigrant women in New Jersey, Parson found that health care and social services suited for these women were detrimentally lacking.
She also has published research on the struggle for abused women to find adequate and appropriate treatment in Santiago, Chile.
For some immigrant women, Parson speculates, the proper response might include a public health clinic embedded in the community, or social networks that keep women from feeling isolated. Or it could be that immigrant women need more help finding legal services, getting help with language and computer skills, or connecting with their children’s schools.
“Ultimately, from this research I’d like to broaden our conceptualizations of cultural competency in health care and to have something of value to say to policymakers,” Parson says.
Parson will begin the research this summer. Aided by anthropology graduate student Carina Heckert, Parson will interview 100 women who immigrated to Dallas from Mexico. She and Heckert, along with select undergraduates, will recruit women through The Family Place, a Dallas-based agency that helps victims of family violence by providing intervention, shelter and counseling.
Research to address immigrant women
“Domestic violence research has been conducted over the last 40 years, since the early 1970s,” Parson says. “However, we don’t have much specialized knowledge about how to address the mental health impacts in immigrant women. Recognition of domestic violence as a health issue emerged in the 1990s. And there’s very little research on domestic violence and cultural competency in health care, especially from an anthropological perspective. Medical anthropologists have a lot to contribute to knowledge about how to address mental health problems in diverse populations.”
Parson is one of 12 Texas researchers to receive a research grant from the Hogg Foundation, which promotes improved mental health for Texans.
“Academic research is an important tool in our quest to understand the complexities of mental health,” said Octavio N. Martinez Jr., executive director of the foundation, in announcing the awards. “The Hogg Foundation selected these projects because they address issues that profoundly affect people’s lives.” — Margaret Allen
SMU archaeologist Sunday Eiselt leads the SMU-in-Taos Childhood Archaeology Project, a systematic and scientific examination of children’s lives through a community archaeological excavation project in the historic and picturesque plaza of Ranchos de Taos in northern New Mexico.
Journalist Julian Smith wrote about Eiselt’s research in the May/June edition of Archaeology magazine.
Sunday Eiselt
The research will provide new perspectives on the dynamics of Spanish and American occupation of New Mexico, says Eiselt, an SMU anthropology professor in SMU’s Dedman College. The plaza was once a hub of village life in Ranchos de Taos. But these days it’s notably absent of children. Their families have been driven to the outskirts of the Catholic village by a booming tourism industry that has pushed up property values.
Still, the children who lived there in decades past left their mark, says Eiselt, who for three years has led digging crews in some of the homes through her work in the SMU Archaeology Field School at the SMU-in-Taos campus. The crews have unearthed children’s artifacts up to 100 years old, including pieces of clay toys, tea sets, doll parts, clothing, mechanical trains, jacks, marbles, child-care implements, modern plastic Legos, Barbie doll parts, action figures and jewelry.
Eiselt’s pilot excavations in 2007 and 2008 revealed patterns that suggest children were integral to the workforce and household economy in the 18th and 19th centuries. In the 1930s, the evidence shows, they were drawn from the workforce into the home and pulled as a consumer into the expanding commercial market as well as into the public education realm, Eiselt says.
Her interest in childhood artifacts is unique because children are rarely documented in archaeological narratives — particularly in the Spanish borderlands, where they appear as victims of slavery and boarding schools.
Eiselt specializes in the historical archaeology of native people of the Southwest.
EXCERPT
Excavated toys and games reflect the changing experience of childhood in New Mexico
By Julian Smith
The full moon casts a warm glow across the dirt plaza of Ranchos de Taos and the adobe walls of the church of Saint Francis of Assisi, made famous by the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe.
Inside the parish hall, archaeologist Sunday Eiselt of Southern Methodist University (SMU) faces a small crowd. She’s a little nervous. Eiselt is about to ask the residents of this conservative Hispanic community near Taos, New Mexico, for permission to dig up their backyards and the floors of their centuries-old homes. Today, the area is known as a ski town and a magnet for both the super-rich and hippie artists, but the community was founded in the 17th century, and is one of the oldest in the country.
Academic achievement improved among students active in structured after-school programs
