Student-Faculty Team Examine Mental Health Care

Tamar Shirinian, a postdoctoral teaching associate, and graduate student Julian McDaniel received a Scholarly Activity and Research Incentive Fund grant in 2020 to examine how health insurance companies mediate the care that clients receive for mental health, and thus the critical relationships between mental healthcare providers and those suffering emotionally.

The team interviewed healthcare professionals in Knoxville virtually or by phone, as pandemic restrictions did not allow them to conduct face-to-face meetings. The study contributes to McDaniel’s master’s thesis work on addiction recovery in Knoxville and is part of a broader research program led by Shirinian examining mental health and recovery that she hopes to expand nationally. 

FAC News

The Forensic Anthropology Center (FAC) is working on multiple interdisciplinary collaborative projects that focus on locating missing individuals, estimating how long they have been deceased, and interpreting trauma.

One team is working in forests, terrain that typically hinders recoveries of human remains due to the density of ground cover that hides visual clues to their locations. By identifying the ways in which human decomposition affects plants growing in close proximity, and how these effects might be detected through changes in plant growth, spectral characteristics of their leaves, and other biochemical changes, the research teams seeks to turn trees from foes to allies. The project is equipping drones to fly over forested areas with arrays of sensors that detect subtle, localized changes within forest canopies that can be used to detect the presence of human remains. The results will be of immense value in using plants to aid in forensic recovery. The team is led by anthropology faculty members Amy Mundorff and Dawnie Steadman, Neal Stewart of the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture Department of Plant Sciences, and includes other faculty and staff within these departments and with the Department of Biosystems Engineering and Soil Science and the Department of Food Science. It is funded by the Department of Defense and USDA Hatch grants.

Two projects funded by the National Institute of Justice tackle some of the most difficult problems in forensic anthropology – estimating how long individuals have been deceased (postmortem interval) and interpreting trauma after burning.

The first project examines how medications in the body impact decomposition rates by studying the drug effects on insects and microbes that feed on the body. Current methods of postmortem interval estimation will need to be modified if it is found that drugs increase or decrease insect development rates. This team is led by Dawnie Steadman, Shawn Campagna from the chemistry department, and Jennifer DeBruyn from the Department of Biosystems Engineering and Soil Science.

The second project is developing a protocol by which blunt force injuries sustained at the time of death can be discriminated from fractures produced by burning. Fire is often used to cover up a crime and the damage to the body can be extensive. This study, led by Giovanna Vidoli and Joanne Devlin, with assistance from colleagues in the Tickle College of Engineering, uses radiography and microscopic techniques to help characterize fractures that are due to blunt force trauma and those created by burning.

Another project, funded through a graduate student-faculty research award, seeks to more accurately predict the probable location of drowning victims and others whose remains are moved by the flow of water. Working with faculty mentor Dawnie Steadman and Nicole McFarlane from the engineering college, Karli Palmer will create “smart” manikins that can be placed in natural bodies of water and tracked for hours or days while collecting quantifiable, replicable data on their movement. Knox County Rescue is also assisting with the field testing. This project will indicate which variables impact the movement of human remains in water and will allow for more accurate predictive models for recovery. In addition, the manikin may serve as a prototype that could be used by future investigators seeking to find missing persons. The ability to narrow down the search area would increase investigators’ chances of success in locating the remains and reduce the labor and resources required.

While training was certainly impacted by COVID-19 this year, the FAC created a new partnership with the Mexican government to train their investigators tasked to locate and recover human remains from mass graves throughout Mexico, many of whom are civilians killed by drug cartels. In addition, Giovanna Vidoli was invited by the International Committee of the Red Cross to go to Mexico to assist with in-country training. Further, Joanne Devlin and Giovanna Vidoli were invited to attend the first half of the FBI Emergency Response Training. 

Rising to Meet the Challenges

Acts of racial violence and the global COVID-19 pandemic shook the nation in 2020. In addition to these societal and healthcare crises, the economic fallout of the pandemic has increased precarity among graduate students nationally. Members of the Anthropology Graduate Student Association (AGSA) rose to meet these challenges and strengthen the UT anthropology department.

In late spring, AGSA Diversity Representatives Tatianna Griffin and Derek Boyd spearheaded efforts to craft an antiracism statement that asserts the department’s commitment to building a “welcoming, inclusive, supportive, and equitable space for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) communities.” The statement, approved by a vote of the faculty, appears in full on our website. Griffin and Boyd also became founding members of the department’s new Diversity and Inclusion Council. In one of the council’s first actions, they created and distributed a departmental climate survey to all graduate students and advocated for workshops for faculty and students that will promote learning and conversation about practices and behaviors that can result in unequal treatment based on race, ability, or gender. These conversations, which began in December, will lead to new understandings and foster a more inclusive and equitable environment.

Under the leadership of the officers and board of AGSA, students are actively seeking solutions to the financial hardships of graduate student life, which have been made worse by the pandemic. In addition to working with campus governance structures and the union in advocating for increases in wages and benefits, AGSA members have taken the lead in supporting students’ basic needs. Starting in fall 2020, they partnered with the Undergraduate Anthropology Association (UAA) to set up a food pantry in a common room on the fourth floor of Strong Hall. Stocked by regular contributions from each group and from the faculty and staff, the pantry is open to all students in need.

“During one of our monthly AGSA meetings, we began talking about how we had raised enough in dues to begin lessening the financial burden that many students face in some small way,” said Rebecca Webster, AGSA president. “We decided a food pantry would be the best way to support all students with the funds we have. AGSA and UAA both donate $25 a month to stock the pantry.”

In addition to creating the food pantry, about 25 grad students participated in a “happiness exchange” last fall, organized by AGSA Social Chair Kelley Cross. COVID made it hard to have social events in person, so AGSA matched participants with a partner with whom they meet for Zoom conversations and exchange small gifts. Through this project, students are combatting isolation and building stronger connections.

Faculty News and Updates

Professor David Anderson was recently appointed to the National Park System Advisory Board National Historic Landmarks Committee. The committee consists of nationally recognized scholars and experts in history, archeology, architectural history, preservation, and cultural resource management. Anderson will serve on the committee from 2020 to 2024.

In collaboration with Professor Nina Fefferman of the Departments of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Mathematics, Professor Alex Bentley also received a RAPID grant from the National Science Foundation titled “Modeling coupled social and epidemiological networks that determine the success of behavioral interventions on limiting COVID-19 spread.” The grant will allow them to develop practical tools (models) that predict the interaction between collective behavior and the dynamics of disease spread across time and space. Understanding what drives collective behavior, which may require different incentives and nudges to help prevent disease transmission, will allow for more effective public health messaging.

Associate Professor Graciela Cabana was part of a research team whose work on the relationship between migration and marine adaptations in South Patagonia appeared in Nature Communications in the summer of 2020.

Distinguished Lecturer Joanne Devlin was a 2019 recipient of the College of Arts and Sciences Advising Award for her outstanding work in undergraduate advising.

Professor Barbara Heath began a two-year term as president of the Society for Historical Archaeology, the largest, international scholarly society for the archaeological study of the modern world, in January 2020.

Assistant Professor Kandace Hollenbach began a two-year term as president of the Tennessee Council for Professional Archaeology in 2020 and was recently elected as president-elect to the Southeastern Archaeological Conference (2020-2022).

Professors Heath and Hollenbach have been awarded a multi-year grant to examine the relationships between people and plants in the diet and practices relating to food (foodways), economy, and ecology of the colonial Chesapeake region from 1630 to 1730. The project is the first comparative study of its kind, and includes samples from 17 archaeological sites in Virginia and Maryland.

Ellen Lofaro has been promoted to be the director of repatriation at UT. Lofaro’s new position is in the Office of the Provost, but she still allocates a portion of her position to curation and collections for the department.

Lofaro, doctoral student Megan Kleeschulte, and Bruce Anderson received a National Institute of Justice grant titled “Implementing NAGPRA: Connecting Medical Examiner and Coroner Offices to Tribal Partners,” in 2019. The work funded by the grant will comprise a large part of Megan’s doctoral research.

Distinguished Lecturer De Ann Pendry received the Vera E. Campbell Advanced Seminar Series grant from The School for Advanced Research (SAR) in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with Irma Velásquez Nimatuj, a Maya K’iche’ anthropologist, journalist, and activist from Guatemala, who is a visiting professor at Stanford University. They will host a seminar titled Indigenous Women’s Proposals to Address the Root Causes of Migration. Together with other seminar participants, they will discuss practical strategies for improving the economic prosperity, health, and well-being of indigenous women and their families in Guatemala with the goals of reducing poverty and emigration from indigenous communities and providing opportunities to develop local capacities and creativity. Originally scheduled for June 2020, the seminar was delayed because of COVID-19 travel restrictions.

Professor Jan Simek, doctoral student Beau Carroll, and colleagues received the Patty Jo Watson Award from the Southeastern Archaeological Conference. Their article “Talking Stones: Cherokee Syllabary in Manitou Cave, Alabama,” published in Antiquity, won the award for 2020, given for the best article or chapter on Southeastern archaeology each year. Simek, colleague Stephen Alvarez of the Ancient Art Archive, and the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma were awarded the 2020 Native American Speaker’s Commendation, given to a specific tribal consultation meeting by the SEAC Native American Council. The award recognizes Simek and Alvarez’s visit to the Chickasaw Nation to report on their documentation of Foxtrap Rockshelter in Alabama under two contracts with the Tribe.

Post-doctoral Fellow Tamar Shirinian was featured as an author interviewee in the journal PoLAR (Political and Legal Anthropology Review) for her article “Fakeness: Digital Inauthenticity and Emergent Political Tactics in Armenia.”

The American Academy of Forensic Sciences elected Professor Dawnie Steadman as chair of the Humanitarian and Human Rights Center (HHRRC) in February 2020.The West Virginia University Biometrics Center of Excellence awarded her a grant for “Longitudinal Study of the Postmortem Variability of Biometric Indicators III.”

Steadman and Associate Professor Amy Mundorff also received a grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for “SPOT: Signatures in Plants Over Targets” in collaboration with C. Neal Stewart, Scott Lenaghan, and Jennifer DeBruyn (see FAC News).

Steadman and Research Associate Professor Giovanna Vidoli received a grant from the International Committee of the Red Cross for “Efficacy and Durability of the Better Body Bag: Outdoor Longitudinal Testing at the Anthropological Research Facility.”

Research Associate Professor Giovanna Vidoli and Distinguished Lecturer Joanne Devlin received a grant from the National Institute for Justice for “Identification of Blunt Force Traumatic Fractures in Burned Bone” (see FAC News).

Jan Simek received an award from the Noyes Family Foundation in support of Cave Archaeology research.

Simek was elected Chief Scientist by the Southeast Cave Conservancy, Inc. This is a two-year unpaid position. The SCCI is the world’s largest land conservancy devoted to protecting caves and undertaking research into cave environments.

Recent Faculty Books

• Simek, J.F., E.E. Pritchard, J. Loubser, S.M. Bow. 2021. The Cosmos Revealed: Precontact Mississippian Rock Art at Painted Bluff, Alabama. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press.
• Stone Linda, Barbara J. Heath, and Patricia Samford, 2020. Artifacts that Enlighten, The Ordinary and the Unexpected. The Society for Historical Archaeology.
• Wall-Scheffler, Cara. M., Helen K. Kurki, and Benjamin M. Auerbach, 2020. The Evolutionary Biology of the Human Pelvis: An Integrative Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Carol Diaz-Granados, Jan F. Simek, George Sabo, and Mark J. Wagner, 2018. Transforming the Landscape Rock Art and the Mississippian Cosmos. Oxford, UK: Oxbow Press.

Student Awards and Accolades

Doctoral student Kamar Afra received a Forensic Sciences Foundation Emerging Forensic Scientist Award from the American Academy of Forensic Sciences in 2020 for her paper “Craniometrics vs. Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP)s: Is There a Correlation?”

Doctoral student Armando Anzellini is one of six grantees to receive the Forensic Sciences Foundation (FSF) Lucas Grant for 2020-2021. Anzellini, working with his advisor Professor Dawnie Steadman, will conduct research titled: “Exploring intra-skeletal variation in stable isotope analysis through non-destructive approaches: Applications of the patterns of skeletal remodeling to forensic contexts.”

Hera Jay Brown, a 2018 UT graduate and anthropology major, has been named a 2020 Rhodes Scholar. A native of Corryton, Tennessee, she began study at the University of Oxford in England this fall. She plans to complete graduate work in migration studies there before pursuing a law degree in the United States. Brown is the first transgender woman to be elected to a Rhodes Scholarship, and the ninth current or former UT student to earn this prestigious honor.

Alexandra Emmons, a 2019 graduate of UT, received an Early Career Grant from the National Geographic Society for Reconstructing the Past: Using Paleo-Soils to Understand Paleoecological Changes from the Middle to Upper Paleolithic in 2019 along with Associate Professor Graciela Cabana.

Doctoral student Angela Mallard, supervised by Associate Professor Ben Auerbach, received a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant for her project “Assessing Multiple Lines of Evidence for Gene Flow in Archaeological Contexts.”

Clare Remy, a junior from Tucson, Arizona, majoring in anthropology with a minor in biology, was one of five recipients of at UT of a Goldwater Scholarship in 2020. The scholarships are awarded to outstanding college sophomores and juniors who are pursuing advanced study in mathematics, the natural sciences, or engineering. Remy’s research focuses on cystic fibrosis manifestations on the human skeleton informs her senior thesis on the Koch historical cemetery in Saint Louis, Missouri. Professors Amy Mundorff and Ben Auerbach are working with her on this project.

Doctoral student Rebecca Webster and Professor Barbara Heath received a 2020 grant from the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, Threatened Sites Fund. The grant funds archaeological work along the banks of Boathouse Pond on Virginia’s Northern Neck, an area threatened by significant erosion associated with geological subsidence and sea level rise. Webster was also the recipient of the Society for Bead Researchers’ Student Conference Travel Award in 2020. Her paper, “Peake, Wampum, or Sewant?: An Analysis of Shell Bead Terminology in the Seventeenth Century Chesapeake,” was the runner-up in the Jamie Chad Brandon Student Paper Competition at the annual meeting of the Society for Historical and Underwater Archaeology in Boston. She also was awarded the Gloria S. King Fellowship in 2019 to study indigenous pottery and pipes at the Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory.

Welcome New Post Docs

Tamar Shirinian received her PhD from Duke University in 2016 and completed a postdoctoral appointment at Milsaps College before coming to UT. Shirinian’s research focuses on social movements and revolutions, environmental anthropology, feminist and queer anthropology, transnationalism, and psychological anthropology. Her current work examines diversity, inclusion, exclusion, and difference within the context of disasters and conflict, with a more recent focus on institutional logics. She looks at how ethnic, racial, and sexual differences affect access to mental health care and how the health care system is structured. Shirinian is working with Research Librarian Donna Braquet and others to collect, preserve, and share oral histories of LGBTQ+ people who live, or have lived, in East Tennessee.

Roger Begrich holds a PhD in anthropology from Johns Hopkins University. Much of his ethnographic work has been conducted in India. He engages global concerns relating to medical and political anthropology, critical legal studies, and Indigenous/Native Studies. Begrich’s work combines an ethnographic analysis of the relations between indigeneity and sovereignty with a comparative discussion of substance use among marginalized populations. His work in India examines the effects of global racial capitalism and (internal) settler colonialism on tribal displacement. Begrich also researches global aging and the use of multiple medications among individuals in aging populations. He has begun research in India on how bodies and selves, as well as social relations, are increasingly mediated by pharmaceuticals and neoliberal forms of elderly care.

Simon Carrignon joined the department as a postdoctoral research fellow in 2019. He received his PhD in 2019 from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain. He specializes in building computer models that help us to understand how social interactions between individuals and groups can impact global changes. Carrignon has worked with archaeologists, historians, biologists, psychologists, and ecologists. He is currently working with Alex Bentley, professor of anthropology, on social interactions at the age of online social media. He is also working with Bentley and Nina Fefferman, professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, on understanding how the spread of socially acquired behaviors can impact the spread of COVID-19. This work can also be used to explore the impact of viruses and other disease-causing agents on the evolution of ancient human societies at larger scales. While at UT, he has also been working outside of the department with epidemiologists and researchers in information science.

The Forensic Anthropology Center welcomed our new Haslam postdoctoral fellow, Charity Owings, who is a forensic entomologist. She earned a PhD in biology from Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. Owings is currently characterizing the insect biodiversity at the Anthropology Research Facility, and her overall research aims to refine time since death estimations using various arthropods. She grew up reading Professor Bass’s books and always dreamed of working at the body farm one day. Now that dream has come true, she could not be happier and more at home in the anthropology department.