Anthropology

Moose are on the loose

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 22:43:40 +0000

Moose are on the loose Rachel Sauer Wed, 08/13/2025 - 16:43

William Taylor , John Wendt and Joshua Miller

Moose have lived in Colorado for centuries—unpacking evidence from history, archaeology, oral traditions

Moose are on the loose in the southern Rockies.

In July 2025, a young wandering bull was captured roaming a city park in Greeley, Colorado. A spate of similar urban sightings alongside some aggressive moose encounters has elevated moose management and conservation into a matter of public debate, especially across metro Denver and the Colorado Front Range.

In Rocky Mountain National Park, a recent study found that moose and elk might be to blame for far-reaching changes to valley ecosystems, as their browsing reduces important plants like willows, depriving beavers of habitat and materials for their wetland engineering. Park wildlife are generally not managed through hunting, but the park has tried techniques like fencing moose away from wetland zones. Publicly, discussion has swirled around further mitigation measures to slow or eliminate moose populations.

CU Boulder archaeologist William Taylor is partnering with paleoecology and conservation paleobiology colleagues to study the ancient animals of the Rockies.

At the heart of this debate is a basic question – do moose belong in the southern Rockies at all?

During much of the last century, moose were apparently rare in Colorado. The animals are absent from some early 20th century official wildlife tallies. Then, in 1978, the Colorado Division of Wildlife – now Colorado Parks and Wildlife – released a group of moose into North Park in north-central Colorado. At the time, biologists understood their efforts to be a reintroduction, but in the years since, wildlife managers have shifted their thinking about the place of moose in local ecosystems.

In the decades that followed, the moose expanded their range and numbers. Today, informal estimates by Colorado Parks and Wildlife put the moose population at around 3,500 animals. Under increased moose browsing pressure and a shifting climate, some mountain wetland environments are changing.

Should these changes be thought of as human-made ecological wounds caused by releasing moose? The National Park Service seems to think so.

Statements from 2025 on the park service website, and other public messaging from wildlife officials, assert that Colorado has never supported a breeding population of moose – only the occasional transient visitor. The factual basis for this idea seems to hinge heavily on an unpublished internal report from 2015, which identified only a few archaeological or historical records of moose near the park.

We are a team of archaeologists, paleoecologists and conservation paleobiologists studying the ancient animals of the Rockies.

Understanding moose and their interactions with people centuries ago means carefully analyzing different traces that survive the passage of time. These can range from the bones of animals themselves to indirect clues preserved in everything from lake sediments to historical records.

Are moose actually native to Colorado?

As scientists studying the past, we know that reconstructing the ancient geographic ranges of animals is difficult. Archaeological sites with animal bones can be a great tool to understand the past, especially for tracing the food choices of ancient humans. But such sites can be rare, and even when they are well preserved and well studied, it can take lots of care and scientific research to identify the species of each bone.

Harder still is determining the intimate details of ancient animals’ lives, including how and where they lived, died or reproduced. Such key details can be especially opaque for moose, who are solitary and elusive. Because of this, moose may not end up in human diets, even where both species have established populations. A comprehensive review of archaeological sites from across Alaska and some areas of the Canadian Yukon, where moose are common today and have likely been present since the end of the last Ice Age, found that moose were nearly absent until the past few centuries. In fact, moose often comprised less than 0.1% of the total number of bones in very large collections, if they appeared at all. In some areas, cultural reasons like taboos against moose hunting can also prevent them from ending up in archaeological bone tallies.

In new research published as a preprint in advance of peer review, we took a closer look at the idea that moose were absent from Colorado before 1978. We combed through newspaper records, photo archives and early travel diaries and identified dozens of references to moose sightings in Colorado spanning the first records in 1860 through the decade of moose reintroduction in the 1970s.

Moose sightings appear in the very earliest written records of the area that would become Rocky Mountain National Park. In his 1863 diary, Milton Estes described happening upon a large moose alongside a band of elk while on a hunting trip.

“Since elk were common I picked out Mr. Moose for my game,” he wrote.

Milton thought he had bagged “the first and only moose that had ever been killed so far south.” He was wrong.

Our archival research turned up even earlier sightings of moose in the area, along with many more across the region in the decades that followed. Diaries, newspapers and photo records from the past two centuries show the presence of not only young bulls, which at times can range widely, but also cows and calves, a sign that local breeding was taking place in Colorado before reintroduction.

These sightings recorded in diaries and newspapers don’t have to stand on their own. Moose appear in older placenames around the state, like the area once known as Moose Park along the road from Lyons to Estes Park. Written accounts from the late 19th and early 20th centuries among Ute, Shoshone and Arapaho peoples describe moose stories, hunts and songs. And though historical records don’t go too much further back than the mid-19th century in Colorado, archaeological records do.

Our survey of Colorado sites turned up ancient moose at Jurgens, near Greeley, dated to more than 9,000 years ago, and even moose bone tools among the ruins of Mesa Verde, only a few centuries ago.

Diaries, newspapers and photo records from the past two centuries show the presence of not only young bull moose, which at times can range widely, but also cows and calves, a sign that local breeding was taking place in Colorado before reintroduction.

This question of whether moose are native to the southern Rockies is not just a philosophical one – its answer will shape management decisions by the National Park Service and others.

Official narrative minimizes moose presence

The contemporary idea of moose as non-native animals reflects a different understanding than was common only a few decades ago. In the 1940s, some biologists described moose as a native species that had been “extirpated except for stragglers.” As recently as the early 1970s, Rocky Mountain National Park officials understood their moose work as a reintroduction of “wild animals once native to the park.” Our findings suggest that the valid knowledge of earlier scientists has since faded or been replaced, repositioning moose as ecological outsiders.

As moose-human conflicts and shifting wetland ecologies prompt hard conversations over how to manage moose, a range of options have been discussed in public discourse. These include courses of action such as the reintroduction of carnivores like wolves, or targeted hunting access for tribes or the public.

If moose are ‘invasive,’ they can be removed

For federal agencies, labels like “invasive” or “non-native” carry legal connotations and can be used to enable other measures, like eradication.

In Olympic National Park, where mountain goats were deemed invasive and ecologically impactful, biologists undertook an extermination campaign that involved shooting the animals from helicopters, despite warnings from archaeologists as long ago as the late 1990s that the data behind their argument was flawed.

As the animal and plant communities of our Rockies change rapidly in a warming world, this kind of policy would not only be unsupported by scientific evidence, but also likely to impede the ability of our animal communities to survive, adapt and thrive.

The historical evidence indicates that moose are not foreign intruders. Archival, archaeological and anthropological data shows that moose have been in the southern Rockies for centuries, if not millennia. Rather than treat moose as a threat, we urge Rocky Mountain National Park and other agencies to work in partnership with tribes, paleoecologists and the public to carefully develop historically grounded management plans for this Colorado native.

William Taylor is an assistant professor of anthropology at the ��. John Wendt is a postdoctoral fellow in natural resources ecology and management at Oklahoma State University. Joshua Miller is an associate professor of geosciences and the University of Cincinnati.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Moose have lived in Colorado for centuries—unpacking evidence from history, archaeology, oral traditions.

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Telling the stories of loss and healing

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 21:52:08 +0000

Telling the stories of loss and healing Rachel Sauer Wed, 08/13/2025 - 15:52

Kathryn E. Goldfarb and Lucas Rozell

Colorado’s Marshall Fire survivors find healing and meaning through oral history project

The Colorado Marshall Fire killed two people and destroyed over 1,000 structures on Dec. 30, 2021.

The news cycle has long since moved on, but people impacted by the fire are still recovering. Part of that process is through storytelling.

The Louisville Historical Museum, which is located 10 miles east of Boulder, later joined by collaborators from the �� Anthropology Department, initiated the Marshall Fire Story Project to preserve the stories of people affected.

CU Boulder researcher Kathryn Goldfarb is an associate professor of anthropology.

“This is the first time we’ve actually sat down and taken this long to talk about it,” said Lisa Clark, one contributor to the project. “’Cause we’re always like, ‘(people) have better things to do. You don’t wanna hear our pain. You don’t wanna hear our stories,’ you know. But yeah, it’s been nice to do it.”

All project contributors are quoted using their real names.

We are a cultural anthropologist and qualitative researcher who are collaborating with the Louisville Historical Museum on the Marshall Fire Story Project. Broadly, we are each involved with research that explores the importance of personal and community narratives for well-being.

However, the Marshall Fire Story Project is not a research project. We have no research questions. Contributors are simply invited to share what they would like about the fire.

While this project embraces the specificity of individual experiences, recent destructive fires in Maui, Hawaii, and Southern California show that the work we are doing is needed in many other locations.

Why oral history?

Recounting personal experiences is critical to the historical record.

Oral history has also become recognized as a powerful method for healing after trauma, both for individuals and larger community groups. Talking about traumatic events may be painful. However, narrative also facilitates meaning-making, strengthens ties within communities, and contributes to social justice efforts.

By telling their own stories in their own words, participants in the Marshall Fire Story Project shape what is remembered and how it is remembered.

Contributors to the project had diverse objectives in sharing their stories. Many welcomed the opportunity to contribute to the historical record, which Jessica Rossi-Katz described as “a record of experience.” Another contributor wanted to share their perspective as a lower-income person. Others mentioned the relevance of local stories as they apply to a global context of climate change.

As wildfires become ever more common, the themes that came up in the oral histories are increasingly relevant to community members, policymakers and scholars alike.

Stories of loss

Two people lost their lives in the fire, along with over 1,000 pets.

“I’d take losing my stuff over losing them,” said Anna Kramer, when describing the loss of her neighbor’s dogs. Kramer, an artist, did lose her stuff, including the majority of her artistic works.

Remediation workers clean the garage of Gigi Yang, a collaborator for the Marshall Fire Story Project. Due to concerns about toxins from smoke and ash residue in their homes, many residents opted for smoke remediation and deep cleaning of their homes. (Photo: Gigi Yang)

Abby McClelland’s family was away from their house when it burned.

“For a while I was really upset that we weren’t there and didn’t get a chance to take anything,” McClelland said. “And the more I think about what we would’ve taken, the more I’m like, that stuff is dumb.”

The family was able to replace their vital records and passports within weeks.

“But things like, you know, my grandmother’s rings or the Champagne cork from our wedding reception. Like things that I would’ve thought, oh, that’s so silly to evacuate that, those are the truly irreplaceable things.”

Mary Barry said the “fire was the ultimate downsizer.” She reflected on the objects she had lost – her daughter’s baby pictures, her sewing machines, a collection of books bound in blue and gold.

The fire also took Barry’s pet turtles, one of whom her husband had kept for over twenty years.

“Losing (a) house is like losing a person, where you mourn the loss of your comfort,” Barry said. This was particularly true in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, where people’s homes were their entire environment during quarantine.

Many of those whose homes did not burn suffered a different kind of ambiguous loss. Their homes were damaged by smoke, which carried with it heavy metals, hazardous chemicals and volatile organic compounds.

Shana Sutton’s family stayed in a hotel for six months while their home was being remediated. Like many others, much of the family’s belongings were deemed nonsalvageable.

“In my head,” Sutton recounted, “I was like, okay, I’m just going to pretend that they all burned.”

Concern with health impacts

As she watched the smoke from a distance, Brittany Petrelli told her brother on the phone, “I can smell how devastating this fire is.” Petrelli, a project contributor involved with the recovery effort, recounted that the fire smelled “like things that shouldn’t be burning. Rubber, plastic building materials.”

Residents with concerns about outdoor and indoor air quality as well as soil and water contamination contacted scientists at the ��, who, along with scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Chemical Sciences Laboratory, conducted air quality sampling. Ultimately, the publicized data for outdoor air quality showed little difference from other urban areas.

Residents whose homes survived but were affected by smoke continued to note symptoms such as sore throats, coughs and stinging eyes for six months and then one year after the fire.

Like others whose homes were damaged by smoke, Beth Eldridge had difficulty obtaining insurance coverage for mitigation. After she attempted to clean char and ash on her own, she experienced persistent health impacts.

After the Marshall Fire, area residents created notes of support for friends and neighbors at the Louisville Public Library; the notes were displayed in the library windows. (Photo: Louisville Historical Museum)

“Being part of an HOA (Home Owner’s Association) should give you two buckets of insurance,” Eldridge explained, “but in reality, everyone is divided and the system makes individuals fend for themselves. My insurance wouldn’t take any responsibility. The HOA insurance wouldn’t take any responsibility. … I was sick and I couldn’t get better and I needed help.”

Accounts from the project highlight uncertainty that remediated personal items were “really clean” – as Shana Sutton shared, it “makes you crazy.” Many people spoke of dissatisfaction with a lack of standards for remediation. Current standards, not specific to wildfires, do not engage the epidemiological and toxicological effects of fire byproducts, although experts in the field recognize these dangers.

Precarity and community solidarity

Being underinsured was a persistent theme in project stories, and some people recounted how negotiating with their insurance companies literally became a full-time job. After the fire, lower-income community members found themselves in an even more acute state of financial uncertainty.

A number of mutual aid groups sprung up in the aftermath of the fire, and several of those groups shared their stories with the project. Meryl Suissa started the Marshall Fire Community group on Facebook, which worked to help families replace items lost in the fire.

“I think what we’ve learned is like, yes, people are okay and they’re strong and they’re resilient and they’re gonna continue fighting,” Suissa said. “But we still have a long way to go to help them heal.”

Kate Coslett, who ran Operation Hotel Sanity, also highlighted how the community came together to contribute to organizations like hers, which delivered home-cooked meals to displaced residents.

“So many volunteers, hundreds of volunteers,” she said. “It’s September (2022), and there are still people making meals. It’s incredible … their empathy and their love, this community is just, I have goose bumps.”

Yet recovery means different things to different people. As Abby McClelland noted, there is a difference between “trauma on the individual level and trauma on the collective level.”

“I can rebuild the house,” McClelland said, “but I can’t rebuild all the houses in the neighborhood, and I can’t plant all the trees, and I can’t, you know, reopen all the businesses. I can’t reverse the trauma in the area. I can only control what’s inside my house. It’s hard to know what’s going to happen on that larger level, and how long that’s going to resonate.”

Like others who shared their accounts with the project, McClelland highlighted a necessity for policy change and governmental actions to prevent further climate-related disasters.

“Individuals can’t solve systemic problems,” she said.

Future of the project

For a community historical museum whose motto is “Be a part of the story,” first-person records constitute valuable resources for both the present and the future.

Our team is currently preparing written and oral project contributor submissions for archiving in a publicly accessible platform. In partnership with Marshall Together and the Community Foundation Boulder County, we are documenting recovery and rebuilding experiences as residents return to their homes.

The first storytellers in our project spoke of trauma and despair, but also gratitude for community. What will future stories tell us as neighbors continue to reunite and adjust to how the community has changed after the Marshall Fire?

This article was written in collaboration with Sophia Imperioli, museum associate – Public History & Oral History, and Gigi Yang, museum services supervisor of the Louisville Historical Museum.

Kathryn E. Goldfarb is an associate professor of anthropology at the ��. Lucas Rozell (MAnth'24) is a research assistant on the CU Anschutz Medical Campus.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Colorado’s Marshall Fire survivors find healing and meaning through oral history project.

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Top photo courtesy the Louisville Historical Museum

CU Boulder instructor named a 2025-2026 Fulbright Scholar

Kylie Clarke — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 17:26:19 +0000

CU Boulder instructor named a 2025-2026 Fulbright Scholar Kylie Clarke Tue, 07/15/2025 - 11:26

Award will allow Teaching Professor Caroline Conzelman to teach and conduct research on sustainability in Murcia, Spain

Caroline Conzelman, a teaching professor in the College of Arts and Sciences Residential Academics Program (RAP) at the ��, has received a Fulbright Senior U.S. Scholar Program award in international affairs and environmental studies for fall 2025 in Spain. The award is provided by the U.S. Department of State and the Fulbright Scholarship Board.

Conzelman’s Fulbright project is titled “Participatory Action Research on Urban-Rural Sustainability Challenges in Murcia, Spain.” Partnering with the Universidad de Murcia, Conzelman will work with undergraduate students to examine sustainability challenges in urban and rural areas of the valley of Murcia.

Trained as a cultural anthropologist, Conzelman’s objectives are to provide students with mentorship and training in applied ethnographic research methods to study how civil society, business and government leaders define and promote sustainable business goals. Additionally, she will give a series of workshops and organize a symposium on campus to present her findings and highlight innovative local solutions as well as meaningful career paths.

“I am honored to have this opportunity and am excited to work with and learn from the faculty and students at MU, and to help facilitate relationships between our universities in support of sustainability through social innovation, entrepreneurship and community engagement,” Conzelman said. “I appreciate the many and varied experiences I have had at CU over the last 28 years that allowed me to be a successful candidate.”

Each year, more than 800 individuals teach or conduct research abroad through the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program. Since 1946, the Fulbright Program has provided more than 400,000 talented and accomplished students, artists and professionals with the opportunity to study, teach and conduct research abroad. Notable awards received by alumni include 63 Nobel Prizes, 98 Pulitzer Prizes and 82 McArthur Fellowships.

“The benefits extend beyond the individual recipient, raising the profile of their home institutions. We hope �� can leverage Caroline Conzelman’s engagement abroad to establish research and exchange relationships, connect with potential applicants and engage with your alumni in the host country,” the Fulbright Program said in its award announcement.

Fulbright is a program of the U.S. Department of State, with funding provided by the U.S. government. Participating governments and host institutions, corporations and foundations around the world also provide direct and indirect support to the program, which operates in more than 160 countries worldwide.

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Award will allow Teaching Professor Caroline Conzelman to teach and conduct research on sustainability in Murcia, Spain.

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Anthropologists awarded major early-career development support

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 30 May 2025 21:44:15 +0000

Anthropologists awarded major early-career development support Rachel Sauer Fri, 05/30/2025 - 15:44

CU Boulder scholars William Taylor and Fernando Villanea have been named 2025 National Science Foundation CAREER award winners

Two �� anthropologists have been named 2025 Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award winners by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support their research of animal domestication and genomic variation.

William Taylor, a CU Boulder assistant professor of anthropology and CU Museum of Natural History curator of archaeology, has been awarded a $419,696 grant for his research project “Understanding Animal Domestication and Human-Environmental Relationships.” Fernando Villanea, an assistant professor of anthropology, has been awarded a $579,010 grant to study “Archaic Hominin Genomic Variation in Modern Human Populations.”

William Taylor, a CU Boulder assistant professor of anthropology and CU Museum of Natural History curator of archaeology, has been awarded a $419,696 NSF CAREER grant for his research project “Understanding Animal Domestication and Human-Environmental Relationships.”

The NSF CAREER Program offers the foundation’s most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty “who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization,” according to the NSF. “Activities pursued by early-career faculty should build a firm foundation for a lifetime of leadership in integrating education and research.”

“Funding from this grant means my research team’s salaries will be supported for the next five years, including hiring a new post-doctoral scholar, to explore the effects of Neanderthal and Denisovan ancestry in living people,” Villanea says. “A portion of the grant will also fund functional genetic experiments in collaboration with scientists at the CU Anschutz School of Medicine.”

Taylor notes that this award “is a tremendous honor and a huge step forward in our scientific investigation of the past. Ancient Mongolia was deeply intertwined with so many parts of the story of animal domestication, from dogs to horses, reindeer, and beyond. It’s exciting we will be able to start exploring that with our interdisciplinary team at CU over the years ahead.”

Doing community archaeology

Taylor’s research aims to understand animal domestication and human-environmental relationships on northeast Asian prehistory through archaeology.

His NSF CAREER project will investigate rare, well-preserved archaeological and biological assemblages recovered from archaeological field research in western Mongolia—including new finds from high mountain snow and ice features and excavation of stratified dry caves—spanning the last four millennia and beyond.

The research will be paired with a multifaceted program of museum education and outreach, building on Taylor’s past findings, providing infrastructure for the protection of cultural resources and the cultivation of international scientific cooperation while supporting early-career scientists and expanding public education in Mongolia and the United States.

The NSF CAREER support will aid Taylor and his Mongolian partners, including the Mongolian Academy of Sciences and National Museum of Mongolia, to analyze ancient animal remains, artifacts and ecofacts with cutting-edge techniques from archaeozoology, biomolecular sciences and paleoenvironmental data from the Mongolian Altai. The research team will seek to establish data-driven models for the introduction and dispersal of domestic livestock to northeast Asia; the timing and role of Mongolian cultures in the innovation of large animal transport, including the chariot, the saddle/stirrup and reindeer riding; and the relationship of key social developments to ancient environments in the eastern Steppe.

Fernando Villanea, an assistant professor of anthropology, has been awarded a $579,010 NSF CAREER grant to study “Archaic Hominin Genomic Variation in Modern Human Populations.”

“Leveraging partnerships and expertise from scientists and institutions at home and abroad, this award will produce key scientific research on animal domestication and the human story,” Taylor noted, adding that the CAREER award will help “to build important educational tools and capacity for a future generation of scientists and scholars, along with strong international partnerships and scientific cooperations between Mongolia and the United States.”

Archaic genetics, modern applications

Villanea’s NSF CAREER research begins with the concept that “living people carry archaic genetic material inherited from other hominins such as Neanderthals and Denisovans. This genetic inheritance can affect fitness and health, and its persistence and effects cannot be fully understood unless studies consider each group’s unique population history and the evolutionary processes that shaped them,” he explained.

The goal of Villanea’s study is to assess the presence and evaluate the impact of archaic hominin ancestry in groups with a complex population history by applying sophisticated computational genetic techniques to existing information. Villanea and his research colleagues aim to develop educational tools, provide training opportunities for students at different educational levels and build capacity in a new generation of scientists.

This research advances knowledge of archaic ancestry in groups with complex admixture. To separate the archaic ancestry contributions from those derived from modern groups, this study analyzes the genomes of individuals that predate well-documented historic processes as well as those from modern peoples. To improve admixture models, the study creates computational tools that benefit from artificial intelligence techniques. The study examines the relationship between archaic gene variants and phenotypic traits.

Villanea’s research will focus on the Neanderthal and Denisovan ancestry distribution in Indigenous American and descendant Latin American genomes, promoting understanding of the forces of evolution as they acted in Indigenous American and descendant Latin American genomes. A goal is that the knowledge gained will empower underrepresented students to access higher education in medical and STEM fields.

“Computational and statistical competency is a lower cost of entry to STEM and medical sciences than hands-on experience in laboratory techniques, and I believe that this trend is democratizing access to genomics research across all institutions,” Villanea noted. “The trend towards free access to scientific resources is exemplified by the public availability of modern and ancient genomes, and the acceptance of preprint services to remove paywalls to exciting new results and methodologies.

“For this reason, I advocate for the inclusion of computational competency in the curriculum for all students, and see an opportunity for online resources to provide an early form of access to evolutionary theory for pre-college level students that can both grow their interest in biology and improve their chances at academic development by equipping them with high-level theory they can be self-taught supplementing their school curriculum.”

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CU Boulder scholars William Taylor and Fernando Villanea have been named 2025 National Science Foundation CAREER award winners.

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Honoring the traditions of people and place

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 05 May 2025 15:59:33 +0000

Honoring the traditions of people and place Rachel Sauer Mon, 05/05/2025 - 09:59

Rachel Sauer

Newly opened exhibit at the University of Colorado Museum celebrates ceramic artist’s donation and the legacy of her family and community

A new piece of Acoma Pueblo pottery begins, in a way, with all the pottery that came before it.

Artisans finely grind shards of old pottery and mix it into clay gathered from Acoma Pueblo land, hand-forming the light yet strong vessels for which they are renowned. There are no precise measurements, no written recipes, for the clay or slip or mineral paints that come together in Acoma Pueblo pottery; “you just know when it’s right,” says artist Dolores Lewis Garcia.

Noted Acoma Pueblo ceramics artist Carmel Lewis Haskaya, a proud CU Boulder alumnus, ensured that her love for her community and its traditions would unite with her love for CU Boulder by donating one of her pieces to the University of Colorado Museum.

Lewis Garcia learned the art from her mother, Lucy M. Lewis, the famed New Mexico ceramics artist known for reviving traditional pottery techniques whose work is displayed in the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. Most of Lewis’ nine children learned by watching her and also became ceramic artists, including her youngest, Carmel Lewis Haskaya.

Lewis Haskaya was not only a respected ceramic artist, but a proud �� alumnus. Before her death in 2019, she ensured that her love for her community and its traditions would unite with her love for CU Boulder by donating one of her pieces to the University of Colorado Museum.

The vibrant cylindrical pot is a centerpiece of the new exhibit “A Family Tradition: Acoma pottery, CU and the Lewis family,” which opened with a reception and ribbon cutting Tuesday evening.

“We are delighted to highlight and honor the important artworks that this family has shared with us,” says Nancy J. Stevens, CU Boulder professor of anthropology and director of the Museum Institute. “It represents a pivotal point for connecting communities and growing meaningful collaborations into the future.”

The exhibit features pieces by Lucy Lewis and many of her children, including Forever Buff Carmel Lewis Haskaya.

“(Lewis Haskaya’s cylinder jar) is not just an object or a gift,” explains William Taylor, a CU Boulder assistant professor of anthropology and CU Museum curator of archaeology who partnered with the Lewis family to create the exhibit.

“For many folks, creating pottery is a way to impart something of yourself in a permanent and lasting way. Having this pottery at CU means that a part of Carmel and her family will always be here in Boulder.”

Learn by watching

Lewis Haskaya belonged to an artistic lineage that can be traced in centuries. For hundreds of years, Acoma Pueblo artists have gone to certain spots on their land to collect the clay, white slip, wild spinach and oxides that are the raw materials for their pottery.

“Being an Acoma potter, there’s a lot of work that goes into it,” Lewis Garcia says.

“Everything is gathered from the land and hand-processed,” adds Claudia Mitchell, also a famed Acoma Pueblo artist and Lewis’ granddaughter. “It teaches you to take your time and be present; you’re putting yourself into the work.”

As a child, Lewis Haskaya learned these traditions and techniques watching her mother. When she came to CU Boulder through the American Indian Educational Opportunity Program and built a career with the Native American Rights Fund, she never forgot or outgrew her community, Mitchell says. Eventually, Lewis Haskaya returned to her community at Acoma, west of Albuquerque, New Mexico, and became an accomplished artist.

Lewis Haskaya was a student of history and art traditions from around the world and was known for creating cylinder vessels in the style of ones found at Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde and other ancient sites, adding her own touch to traditional designs.

The cylindrical vessel made by noted Acoma Pueblo artist Carmel Lewis Haskaya, which she donated to the University of Colorado Museum before her death in 2019.

“She had the hardest time grinding mineral paints,” Lewis Garcia recalls with a laugh, adding that her sister eventually conquered the hurdle that many artisans using traditional techniques encounter.

Like her mother and siblings, and now her nieces and nephews, Lewis Haskaya walked Acoma land to specific spots for the gray and yellow clays, the minerals and the plants that are the foundation of traditional techniques. “To get the white slip, it’s not in an easy place,” Lewis Garcia says. “It’s underground and there’s a big boulder on it. You have to use it sparingly.”

Though it’s more common now to use kilns rather than dung fires, the process of thinning vessel walls, of burnishing with a stone, of applying the geometric patterns associated with Acoma Pueblo pottery hasn’t changed for centuries.

‘The ties that bind us together’

While pottery is revered as art, “in our traditional ways, it’s a utility, it’s an item that we use,” says Benny Shendo Jr., CU Boulder associate vice chancellor for Native American affairs and a member of the Jemez Pueblo Tribe. “And it plays a big role in our ceremonial life.”

Mitchell notes that traditional pottery helps not only those who make it, but those who use it to “ground ourselves to the place that we’re from; it’s that connection that we have to our land and to our people—not only just for personal use, but for community use. It gives us that tie to one another. We’re keeping those traditions alive not only through our dance and song but through our pottery.

“Those are the ties that bind us together, that make us a people. It’s important to keep those ties, to make sure that those things—the pottery making, the dancing, the singing—all of those are taught to our younger generations, because that helps them identify who they are and where they are. It helps give them a sense of place and sense of purpose.”

“It’s part of life,” says Diana Lim Garry (Anth'71), Lucy Lewis’ granddaughter who lives in Boulder and helped bring the exhibit to life, loaning pieces from her own collection. “Everywhere we go—you’re walking on a hike and you’re walking along the streambed, and you’re saying, ‘Would that make a good polishing stone?’ You go along, even (in) roadcuts there’s all these pretty colors of the minerals in the rocks: ‘Would that make good paint?’ It’s always on your mind that this is something that’s been done for a long time and will continue to be done thanks to my aunts and my cousins.”

Mitchell adds that a pottery vessel made in traditional ways allows the Acoma Pueblo people to say “I have my piece of the rock. That’s how we identify ourselves, by place and name, that’s our place in this world, and no matter where we go in this world, we can always go back to that one place, and that’s where we belong. For our people, that’s who we are, that’s where we’re from.”

"A Family Tradition: Acoma pottery, CU and the Lewis family” is open to the public during regular museum hours, which are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.

Claudia Mitchell (left), Dolores Lewis Garcia (center) and Diana Lim Garry (right) with the vessel made by Carmel Lewis Haskaya, Lewis Garcia's sister and Mitchell's and Lim Garry's aunt; Lewis Haskaya donated the vessel to the University of Colorado Museum.

Pieces made by famed Acoma Pueblo artist Lucy M. Lewis are part of the new University of Colorado Museum exhibit "A Family Tradition: Acoma pottery, CU and the Lewis family."

Following in the footsteps of her grandmother, Lucy M. Lewis, Acoma Pueblo artist Claudia Mitchell made these pieces using traditional techniques and designs.

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Newly opened exhibit at the University of Colorado Museum celebrates ceramic artist’s donation and the legacy of her family and community.

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Top image: Carmel Lewis Haskaya enjoying the Colorado outdoors while she was a CU Boulder student (Photo: Lewis family)

Women on trial speak clearly through their clothing

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 21:27:03 +0000

Women on trial speak clearly through their clothing Rachel Sauer Mon, 04/28/2025 - 15:27

Collette Mace

CU Boulder researcher Carla Jones finds that what Indonesian women wear in court can convey messages of piety and shame, or just the appearance of them

No matter who you are and what clothes you have on, you have probably, at some point, thought about how what you wear affects how you are seen.

Fashion is an important mode of self-expression, but it can also be a significant component of social communication. �� anthropology Professor Carla Jones’ recently published research focusing on fashion within the Indonesian criminal justice system illustrates how appearance can be a public and personal feature of social and political communication.

CU Boulder researcher Carla Jones, a professor of anthropology, noticed that when Indonesian women were accused of corruption, they faced intense scrutiny about their appearances, both before and during their trials.

Jones’ interest in Indonesia started when she visited the country in college, but her youth in Southeast Asia also played a part in her sustained interest in the culture there. As an anthropologist, she says, she is interested in diversity–in which Indonesian culture and social life is rich.

She also credits her interest in learning to speak Indonesian with her total immersion there. “Learning a new language can change your life,” she says. “Cultural anthropologists need to be able to ask questions and understand. You have to learn how to be an insider and an outsider at once.”

In the past two decades, public political culture in Indonesia has become increasingly focused on corruption. Although Indonesia is not unusually corrupt, many of the most visible corruption trials have captivated public attention through media focus on theft of public funds.

Jones noticed that when women were accused of corruption, they faced intense scrutiny about their appearances, both before and during their trials. Jones says she noticed that female defendants in corruption cases adjusted their clothing in ways that went far beyond the public norms for the majority-Muslim country.

Modesty was a particularly compelling visual strategy. Although modest styles are increasingly popular globally (think: trad-wife trends on TikTok), the styles that accused Indonesian women adopted for trials were especially visible when they appeared in court and were very different from their styles of dress prior to their trials, Jones says.

Many women, she says, would elect to wear facial coverings, called a niqab or cadar, when appearing before a judge. Wearing a niqab is not especially common in Indonesia. Jones argues in her paper that women choosing to express their religion so outwardly was also an effort to appear more pious and ashamed of their actions (or more innocent) to judges and to the public.

Niqab in court

So, does it work? According to Jones, yes, along with other factors. The women in these cases who wore a niqab to court tended to get shorter prison sentences than others did. “Their attorneys also did a really good job conveying that they are mothers, and their justification was to provide for their children,” she says.

However, that doesn’t mean these women on trial were received the same way all over the world. When Anniesa Hasibuan, an internationally famous modest-fashion designer who was charged with fraud, took the stand in West Java, the coverage expanded to all over the world, including the United States.

The international coverage of Hasibuan’s trial called additional attention to her choice to wear a niqab. Some Indonesians who were following her case closely viewed her choice to cover her face much as some Americans might: as an attempt to foreclose transparency about her appearance and therefore her finances. Many Indonesians viewed her appearance as a sign of dishonesty rather than piety.

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CU Boulder researcher Carla Jones finds that what Indonesian women wear in court can convey messages of piety and shame, or just the appearance of them.

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Anniesa Hasibuan (center) and her husband leave court in West Java, Indonesia. (Photo: Antara Foto/Reuters)

In the archaeological record, size does matter

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 15:24:57 +0000

In the archaeological record, size does matter Rachel Sauer Mon, 04/14/2025 - 09:24

Rachel Sauer

CU Boulder archaeologist Scott Ortman and colleagues around the world explore relationships between housing size and inequality in PNAS Special Feature

If the archaeological record has been correctly interpreted, stone alignments in Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge are remnants of shelters built 1.7 million years ago by Homo habilis, an extinct species representing one of the earliest branches of humanity’s family tree.

Archaeological evidence that is unambiguously housing dates to more than 20,000 years ago—a time when large swaths of North America, Europe and Asia were covered in ice and humans had only recently begun living in settlements.

Between that time and the dawn of industrialization, the archaeological record is rich not only with evidence of settled life represented by housing, but also with evidence of inequality.

CU Boulder archaeologist Scott Ortman partnered with colleagues Amy Bogaard of the University of Oxford and Timothy Kohler of the University of Florida on a PNAS Special Feature focused on housing size in the archaeological record and inequality.

In a Special Feature published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), scholars from around the world draw from a groundbreaking archaeological database that collects more than 55,000 housing floor area measurements from sites spanning the globe—data that support research demonstrating various correlations between housing size and inequality.

“Archaeologists have been interested in the study of inequality for a long time,” explains Scott Ortman, a �� associate professor of anthropology who partnered with colleagues Amy Bogaard of the University of Oxford and Timothy Kohler of Washington State University to bring together the PNAS Special Feature. (Special Features in PNAS are curated collections of articles that delve into important topics.)

“For a long time, studies have focused on the emergence of inequality in the past, and while some of the papers in the special feature address those issues, others also consider the dynamics of inequality in more general terms.”

Kohler notes that "we use this information to identify the fundamental drivers of economic inequality using a different way of thinking about the archaeological record—more thinking about it as a compendium of human experience. It’s a new approach to doing archaeology.”

Patterns of inequality

Ortman, Bogaard and Kohler also are co-principal investigators on the Global Dynamics of Inequality (GINI) Project funded by the National Science Foundation and housed in the CU Boulder Center for Collaborative Synthesis in Archaeology in the Institute of Behavioral Science to create the database of housing floor area measurements from sites around the world.

Scholars then examined patterns of inequality shown in the data and studied them in the context of other measures of economic productivity, social stability and conflict to illuminate basic social consequences of inequality in human society, Ortman explains.

“What we did was we crowdsourced, in a sense,” Ortman says. “We put out a request for information from archaeologists working around the world, who knew about the archaeological record of housing in different parts of world and got them together to design a database to capture what was available from ancient houses in societies all over world.”

Undergraduate and graduate research assistants also helped create the database, which contains 55,000 housing units and counting from sites as renowned as Pompeii and Herculaneum, to sites across North and South America, Asia, Europe and Africa. “By no stretch of the imagination is it all of the data that archaeologists have ever collected, but we really did make an effort to sample the world and pull together most of the readily available information from excavations, from remote sensing, from LiDAR,” Ortman says.

The housing represented in the data spans non-industrial society from about 12,000 years ago to the recent past, generally ending with industrialization. The collected data then served as a foundation for 10 papers in the PNAS Special Feature, which focus on the archaeology of inequality as evidenced in housing.

Housing similarities

In their introduction to the Special Feature, Ortman, Kohler and Bogaard note that “economic inequality, especially as it relates to inclusive and sustainable social development, represents a primary global challenge of our time and a key research topic for archaeology.

In the PNAS Special Feature published Monday, researchers from around the world describe evidence of inequality found in archaeological data of housing size. (Cover image: Johnny Miller/Unequal Scenes)

“It is also deeply linked to two other significant challenges. The first is climate change. This threatens to widen economic gaps within and between nations, and some evidence from prehistory associates high levels of inequality with lack of resilience to climatic perturbations. The second is stability of governance. Clear and robust evidence from two dozen democracies over the last 25 years that links high economic inequality to political polarization, distrust of institutions and weakening democratic norms. Clearly, if maintenance of democratic systems is important to us, we must care about the degree of wealth inequality in society.”

Archaeological evidence demonstrates a long prehistory of inequality in income and wealth, Ortman and his colleagues note, and allows researchers to study the fundamental drivers of those inequalities. The research in the Special Feature takes advantage of the fact “that residences dating to the same chronological period, and from the same settlements or regions, will be subject to very similar climatic, environmental, technological and cultural constraints and opportunities.”

Several papers in the Special Feature address the relationship between economic growth and inequality, Ortman says. “They’re thinking about not just the typical size of houses in a society, but the rates of change in the sizes of houses from one time step to the next.

“One thing we’ve also done (with the database) is arrange houses from many parts of the world in regional chronological sequences—how the real estate sector of past societies changed over time.”

The papers in the Special Feature focus on topics including the effects of land use and war on housing disparities and the relationship between housing disparities and how long housing sites are occupied. A study that Ortman led and conducted with colleagues from around the world found that comparisons of archaeological and contemporary real estate data show that in preindustrial societies, variation in residential building area is proportional to income inequality and provides a conservative estimator for wealth inequality.

“Our research shows that high wealth inequality could become entrenched where ecological and political conditions permitted,” Bogaard says. “The emergence of high wealth inequality wasn’t an inevitable result of farming. It also wasn’t a simple function of either environmental or institutional conditions. It emerged where land became a scarce resource that could be monopolized. At the same time, our study reveals how some societies avoided the extremes of inequality through their governance practices.”

The researchers argue that “the archaeological record also shows that the most reliable way to promote equitable economic development is through policies and institutions that reduce the covariance of current household productivity with productivity growth.”

GINI Project data, as well as the analysis program developed for them, will be available open access via the Digital Archaeological Record.

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CU Boulder archaeologist Scott Ortman and colleagues around the world explore relationships between housing size and inequality in PNAS Special Feature.

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Counting hidden deaths at the U.S.’s most dangerous border crossing

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 18:23:17 +0000

Counting hidden deaths at the U.S.’s most dangerous border crossing Rachel Sauer Wed, 02/26/2025 - 11:23

Cody DeBos

CU PhD candidate Chilton Tippin working to document migrant mortality in El Paso

With the desert sun beating down on the jagged trails of Mount Cristo Rey just outside El Paso, Texas, Chilton Tippin, a PhD candidate in cultural anthropology at the ��, wipes sweat from his brow. His backpack is weighed down with bottles of water and food—not for himself, but for the people his research group expects to find hiding in the desert.

In the distance, he sees groups of migrants who just crossed the Mexican border, many of them exhausted and injured, pursued by Border Patrol agents on horseback and in helicopters.

CU Boulder PhD candidate Chilton Tippin spent the summer of 2024 documenting the crisis at a deadly crossing point along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Tippin recalls this almost-daily scene on the mountain, a pilgrimage site that has become the deadliest crossing point along the U.S.-Mexico border.

He spent the summer of 2024 documenting the regional crisis. Though he originally expected to study the environmental impact of the Rio Grande, the unfolding humanitarian crisis was too important to ignore.

“My dissertation is about the Rio Grande, but since the river has been turned into a border and become heavily militarized, it has become a site for a lot of violence and death,” he says.

Yet, when Tippin tried to gather data on how many migrants were dying in the El Paso region, he ran into another problem: bureaucratic stonewalls. Many deaths, he discovered, weren’t being officially counted at all.

Without accurate data, the full scale of the crisis in El Paso is obscured, he says, and over the course of his fieldwork, Tippin saw how systemic failures, political pressure and logistical challenges combine to erase countless migrant deaths from public view.

He’s on a mission to change that.

Life and death on Mount Cristo Rey

“We would go up the mountain regularly,” Tippin recalls, “because a lot of the migrants and undocumented people trying to sneak across would be staged just on the Mexican side of the border.”

Mount Cristo Rey, the northernmost peak of the Sierra Juárez mountain range, is famous for the 29-foot-tall statue of Jesus on the Cross at its summit. With roughly two-thirds of the mountain in Texas and the rest in Mexico, it has also become a major hotspot for border crossings.

“When we would approach, often there were 20 or 30 people just sitting there in the desert with no shade, and it’d be 110 degrees (F). They would come running to us, and we would drop our backpacks and hand out 50 water bottles and any food we could carry,” Tippin says.

The migrants he and his team encountered weren’t just battling the elements. Many had endured days or weeks of travel, cartel-controlled smuggling routes and the fear of being caught and detained, or worse.

“Because of the whole process of being chased by Border Patrol in the desert, where the heat is up to 115 degrees, people are malnourished, depleted and exhausted,” Tippin says. “Then they try to swim across the river, and they’re drowning. Or they’re going out into the desert and getting lost and succumbing to dehydration and heat illness.”

Water bottles are placed beneath a religious display on the border between the United States and Mexico near El Paso, Texas. (Photo: Chilton Tippin)

The mountain itself is a paradox, both a path to safety and a trap ready to spring. The rugged terrain provides cover from Border Patrol and makes expeditions up the slopes more difficult, but it also means there’s no easy escape if something goes wrong.

“The mountain itself is such a surreal landscape,” Tippin recalls. “We often felt like we were in The Matrix or The Twilight Zone because we could be up there just kind of walking on the trails, and people are getting chased and detained and tackled.

“It’s also weird because it’s a religious place. But at the same time you’re moving through that landscape, people are running for their lives.”

The cartel’s grip on the El Paso region

For many of the migrants Tippin encountered, danger didn’t begin on the mountain. In Ciudad Juárez, just across the border from El Paso, the Juárez Cartel has taken control of border crossings, turning human smuggling into a lucrative extension of its drug trade.

“I don’t want to push this idea that the violence is just a ‘Mexico problem.’ But the reality is that people wouldn’t be forced into these cartel-run routes if they had a safe, legal way to cross the border,” Tippin says.

Cartel smugglers, known as coyotes, lead groups of migrants across the border, often charging thousands of dollars per person. In the mountains, the cartel stations lookouts to monitor movements of migrant groups and evade the Border Patrol.

“They are just posted up on the peaks, watching for agents and guiding groups through,” Tippin says. “Border Patrol would try to menace them with helicopters, but they never actually go up there because it’s too dangerous.”

Even for individuals who make it safely across the border, the ordeal often isn’t over. Many are sent right back into cartel-controlled territory, where they face violence, extortion or death.

A helicopter flies over the rugged terrain at border between the United States and Mexico near El Paso, Texas. (Photo: Chilton Tippin)

“That’s the deadly dynamic,” Tippin says. “People cross, they get pushed back and then they get extorted again. Women get assaulted. Families get separated. And they keep trying, because what choice do they have?”

The deaths no one wants to count

When the official numbers of migrant deaths didn’t match what Tippin was seeing on the ground, he quickly realized documenting the crisis would be harder than expected.

“I went through the whole summer filing open records requests, and I was told, ‘We don’t count migrants,’” he recalls. “Then when I tried to get autopsy reports, they said that if I wanted to see the records of drowning victims, it would cost over $4,000. And if I wanted a broader dataset—covering deaths in the desert as well—I got a bill for over $100,000.”

Tippin notes that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reporting rules can be obscure, which may lead to underreporting. If a migrant drowns in the El Paso canals or is found in the desert by local first responders, the Texas National Guard or civilians, they aren’t counted in the official data. If they die in a hospital after being rescued, they also don’t make the list. Even if remains are discovered by CBP personnel but the person was not in custody, guidelines state the death isn’t reportable.

As a result, the official data can be off by hundreds—if not thousands—of deaths.

This isn’t just an oversight, Tippin notes. It’s part of a pattern. No More Deaths, a volunteer organization, exposed years of under-counted fatalities, with actual migrant deaths sometimes exceeding CBP’s reports by two to four times.

For Tippin, the answer to why this happens is simple: Acknowledging the full scale of the crisis would shed light on the deadly consequences of U.S. border policies.

“I think that the deaths go uncounted because it’s inconvenient for the whole political and bordering apparatus to have it be known that, as a consequence of their policies and their practices, hundreds of people are dying in the United States, in the deserts and in the rivers that form the border,” he says.

Fighting for the truth

Despite the resistance, Tippin and several grassroots organizations aren’t giving up the fight. They’re using the limited data they have, as well as anecdotal fieldwork, to push for policy changes, local resolutions and new initiatives aimed at tracking and preventing migrant deaths.

Clothing and water bottles left at shady spot on the United States-Mexico border near El Paso, Texas. (Photo: Chilton Tippin)

“It’s such a preventable public health trend,” he says, “and the way we attempt to address problems such as these is to gather data on them.

“We need to make what’s happening apparent and use the data to strategically implement interventions that could help reverse this alarming and tragic trend.”

One organization in Tucson, Arizona, Humane Borders, is using this approach. It works directly with the local medical examiner’s office to gather precise data on migrant deaths. That data is then used to strategically place water stations in high-risk areas.

Tippin and others want to replicate that success in El Paso, but without government cooperation, progress is slow.

“The medical examiner’s office in Tucson works with humanitarian groups,” he explains. “In El Paso, they won’t even meet with us. That’s the difference.”

But activists like Tippin aren’t waiting for permission. They continue to document deaths, advocate for policy changes and pressure local officials to increase transparency.

Recently, Tippin and his research team went before the El Paso County commissioners, pushing them to acknowledge the crisis and demand more transparency from the medical examiner’s office.

“We recently had them pass a resolution decrying all the deaths in El Paso. It’s a step in the right direction, but we need more than words—we need action,” he says.

In the El Paso region, migrants continue to suffer and die from preventable causes. The work to help them is slow, and the resistance is strong. Yet Tippin and others refuse to back down because, ultimately, it’s not about numbers.

“These aren’t just statistics,” he says. “These are people. And until we start treating them as such, nothing is going to change.”

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CU PhD candidate Chilton Tippin working to document migrant mortality in El Paso.

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Top photo: Chilton Tippin

‘She remains a touchstone’

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 09 Jan 2025 18:42:08 +0000

‘She remains a touchstone’ Rachel Sauer Thu, 01/09/2025 - 11:42

Clay Bonnyman Evans

CU Boulder anthropologist says ‘Lucy’ is pivotal to the science of human origins a half-century after her discovery

A half-century after her discovery in Ethiopia, the 3.2-million-year-old hominin popularly known as “Lucy” remains a critical touchstone in humanity’s understanding of its origins.

Matt Sponheimer, a CU Boulder professor of anthropology, notes that the Australopithecus afarensis skeleton known as Lucy is "instantly recognizable in a world awash in fossils."

Officially labeled A.L.288-1, Lucy extended humanity’s ancient history by almost a million years, and she remains a standard to which decades of discoveries have been compared.

“Lucy is instantly recognizable in a world awash in fossils,” says Matt Sponheimer, a �� professor of anthropology whose research focuses on the ecology of early hominins from the African continent. “She is in many ways a touchstone.”

American anthropologist Donald Johanson first noticed what appeared to be a human-like elbow while out looking for fossils with a graduate student on Nov. 24, 1974, at Afar, Ethiopia, and soon spied multiple fragments nearby. He and his team eventually unearthed 47 remarkably well-preserved bones—about 40% of a complete skeleton—including skull fragments, a mandible with teeth, ribs and pieces of an arm, leg, pelvis and spine.

Lucy was eventually revealed to be an early hominin—a member of a hominid subfamily that includes humans, chimps and bonobos—with a brain about one-third to one-fourth the size of modern humans who walked upright. Research suggests that Lucy’s kind thrived in a wide range of ecosystems, from woodlands to grasslands and riverine forests.

Sharing characteristics of both Australopithecus africanus, a previously discovered hominin from South Africa, and chimpanzees, Lucy was assigned to a new species, Australopithecus afarensis.

Lucy's well-preserved skeleton, comprising about 40% of her body, provided unprecedented insights into early hominin anatomy.

A singular discovery

When Lucy was discovered, she was “singular,” Sponheimer says. But subsequent research has uncovered hundreds of fossils from Australopithecus afarensis as well as other distinct hominin species and footprints of bipedal hominins preserved in volcanic ash.

A sculptural reconstruction of the hominin known as Lucy by artist Elisabeth Daynes. (Photo: Elisabeth Daynes)

Despite fifty years of major discoveries, anthropological consensus still considers Lucy a likely ancestor to modern humans.

Beyond her monumental significance to the scientific understanding of human origins, Lucy has played a key role in educating people about evolution and anthropology.

Her fame and wide recognition have helped spur generations of children’s and students’ interest in the field. Johanson’s best-selling 1981 book, Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind, is still widely read by popular audiences.

“A huge number of anthropologists were inspired by that book,” Sponheimer says. “When I read it, I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this is the kind of thing I would like to pursue.’”

Years later, he considers not just anthropology but also research in the broader humanities, arts and sciences to be critical to human knowledge and flourishing. He cautions against the unforeseen consequences of American culture’s gradual shift to a more instrumental, economic view of the world.

“Exploring is part of what it means to be human. What’s more human than experiencing wonder and trying to understand the world around us? Tens of thousands of years of archaeology teaches us that. Channeling exploration into a narrow economic field of vision misses the point, I think, and is ultimately self-defeating on the economic front,” he says.

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CU Boulder anthropologist says ‘Lucy’ is pivotal to the science of human origins a half-century after her discovery.

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Top image: model of a Australopithecus afarensis skull (Photo: iStock)

Learning the recipe for grizzly gourmet

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 14:30:00 +0000

Learning the recipe for grizzly gourmet Rachel Sauer Thu, 12/12/2024 - 07:30

Doug McPherson

CU Boulder anthropology PhD candidate Sabrina Bradford has been learning what’s on the menu for grizzlies in Montana

If you’re ever heading to Montana’s backcountry, you’d be hard pressed to find a better guide than Sabrina Bradford, a �� PhD candidate in biological anthropology.

Bradford has spent more than a decade in the area’s countryside, mostly on horseback, studying conflict between humans and wildlife, social-ecological systems, livestock damage and the grizzly-bear diet.

Lately she’s been getting noticed for that last item.

Anthropology PhD candidate Sabrina Bradford (left) wrote Grizzly Bear Foods: Reference Guide to the Plants, Animals, and Fungi in the Montana Grizzly Bear's Diet, published by Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks.

This fall, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks published her new 100-page book, Grizzly Bear Foods: Reference Guide to the Plants, Animals, and Fungi in the Montana Grizzly Bear's Diet, which will be part of the state’s “bear aware” education program for the public in 2025.

“I saw a lot about how grizzlies used the landscape,” says Bradford, who sometimes has ridden 20 miles a day in the backcountry doing research and working as a guide and bear education specialist. “I took plenty of photos of grizzly bear signs―areas where it looked like a tiller had rolled through the soil, over rocks and torn up trees. I wanted people to be able to see the landscape similar to the way I did. It’s really important to me that the public understands what bears are actually doing on the landscape.”

Of course, that landscape is a massive buffet for grizzlies, whose four food groups are plants, animals, fungi and trash from humans. A few specific examples of their diet: grasses, shrubs, seeds and fruits of trees, mushrooms, ducks, bird eggs, trout, salmon, squirrels, beaver, moose, bison, elk, deer, bighorn sheep, ants, termites and bees.

Bradford, who graduates this month, says grizzlies serve an important role as seed dispersers within the ecosystem there, and many of the shrubs grizzlies eat produce berries (e.g. huckleberry, raspberry, serviceberry, grouse whortleberry, buffaloberry) that are dispersed via scat.

‘Pretty cool animals’

“Bears are pretty cool animals,” Bradford says. “They have incredible spatiotemporal memory [they can recall where and when food was presented], and they use social learning. Mom teaches her cubs food acquisition strategies. This is key for people to understand, those who question why cubs were removed from an area as well as when the mother is removed for dumpster diving. She’s just teaching her cubs how to access a reliable food resource.”

Bears are also not above stealing other animals’ food stash, an activity called kleptoparasitism.

Grizzly bears sometimes steal other animals' food stashes, an act called kleptoparasitism. (Photo: Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks)

“People who hike in grizzly country with their dogs off the leash say their dog will protect them. That doesn’t really work,” Bradford explains. “Kleptoparasitism is one of the food-source acquisition strategies grizzlies use, and they’ll steal food from packs of wolves. Wolves will yield to grizzly bears, and your dog is nowhere near as tough as a pack of wolves.”

Bradford says while she’s seen many grizzlies, she’s never had to use her bear spray. Her advice to avoid attacks: “Realize that the human voice is the most powerful deterrent out there, not radios or bear bells. Talk loud in areas of low visibility so the bears can hear you coming. It’s critical to understand that you shouldn’t surprise a bear, that they’ll do anything to protect their cubs. And be aware of magpies or ravens in the forest because they’re a sign you might be hiking up on a carcass.”

And while grizzlies’ sense of hearing is strong, their sense of smell is astounding. “The size of the olfactory bulb, the part of the brain that processes scent information in grizzlies, is more than five times larger than humans’ olfactory bulb.” She advises people to sleep in clothes they haven’t cooked in: “Just because you can’t smell food on your clothes doesn’t mean bears can’t.”

Bradford adds that there is a common misunderstanding that grizzlies are looking to wipe out the first person they see and that livestock producers want to kill all grizzlies.

“That isn’t true,” she says. “Yes, livestock loss to grizzlies does occur, but ranchers I interviewed said over 80% of the grizzlies out there never cause any trouble. And other ranchers reported that it’s common to see grizzlies grazing grass in the same fields that the cattle use.”

She recalls one rancher telling her, “’Wildlife is embedded deep in our traditions. We don't hate grizzly bears; they're amazing animals. I don't want to give up all I have to the grizzly bear but I'm willing to share it.’”

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CU Boulder anthropology PhD candidate Sabrina Bradford has been learning what’s on the menu for grizzlies in Montana.

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