College of Liberal Arts - College of Arts and Sciences - Washington ...

STUDENT ACTIVITIES & AWARDS• Isaac Powell (M.F.A. candidate)is this year’s recipient of thegrand prize award of $20,000 forShifting Gears, a national juriedexhibit for young artists with disabilitiesopening September 26 atthe Smithsonian’s S. Dillon RipleyCenter. The jury was impressedwith his entire collection, choosinghis piece Growthplate as the selectedart work. The awards receptionwill be held in Washington,D.C., September 21.• Melissa Hussain’s (Ph.D. candidate,American studies) article“Seas, Slaves, and Cents: ReadingPolitical Economy in Wide SargassoSea and A Small Place” has beenaccepted for publication in theJournal of Postcolonial Writing. Inaddition, Hussain is under contractto write a bibliographic entry onthe early twentieth-century Indianfeminist writer Rokeya Hossain,which will be included in the Compendiumof Twentieth Century Novelistsand Novels (Facts on File, 2006).Also, Hussain’s book review of PostcolonialWhiteness: A Critical Readeron Race and Empire will appear inthe next issue of In-Between: Essaysand Studies in Literary Criticism.• An article by Benedict J. Colombi(Ph.D. candidate, anthropology),titled “Dammed inRegion Six: The Nez Perce Tribe,Agricultural Development, andthe Inequality of Scale,” is beingpublished in the journal AmericanIndian Quarterly 29(4).• Tracy Behler (M.A. candidate,speech and hearing sciences) receivedthe WSU Spokane LeadershipAward for spring 2005.• Erin Mae Clark (M.A. candidate,English) gave a paper, “‘Shut inReservations’ and Cultural Tourism:D.H. Lawrence’s Hopi SnakeDance and Resistance to AmericanCultural Imperialism,” at the tenthInternational D.H. Lawrence Conference,held this year in Santa Fe,June 26 to July 1. The conferencewas in the Hotel Santa Fe, ownedby the Picurus Pueblo of NewMexico, and several of the openingsessions concerned the EnglishNational Science Magazine HighlightsResearch of Anthropology ProfessorThe work of anthropology professor Timothy A. Kohler was highlighted inthe July 2005 issue of Scientific American magazine. Utilizing grants from theNational Science Foundation (NSF), Kohler is principal investigator of a projectthat is helping to create new understanding about settlement system changes inthe U.S. Southwest between A.D. 600 and 1300.“I think what is especially interesting to the scientific community,” saidKohler, “is that our research combines traditional archaeological methods withhigh-tech tools including computer modeling and imaging. We are finding thatour simulations, using new agent-based modeling tools, help us to put the resultsof traditional archaeology into a more meaningful context.” Kohler coauthoredthe Scientific American article with researchers George J. Gumerman andRobert G. Reynolds.Kohler’s team, which also includes graduate students and other faculty atWSU and archaeologists at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in Colorado,uses agent-based modeling to reconstruct land use by Puebloan peoples in theCentral Mesa Verde region in Colorado. Their new research methods allow thisteam to weigh the importance of multiple factors, such as hunting, availability offuel wood, water, and changing agricultural production, on regional settlementpatterns and on the number of people who can make a living on the landscape.“Computer models can provide basic insights regarding how individuals,households, and even entire societies may have interacted with their naturalenvironment,” said Thomas Baerwald, NSF program director and administratorof Kohler’s NSF grant. “There may be parallels between what happened in a historicalcontext and what is going on in these regions today.”Researchers say in the article:One of the great benefits of computer simulation is that it allowsresearchers to conduct experiments, a luxury that is otherwiseimpossible in an historical science such as archaeology. We havefound that virtual households often affect their environment inways that limit the options of their offspring and even limit theirlong-term survival. In addition to illuminating the distant past,these simulations may point to methods for sustaining natural resourcesin the future.Kohler joined the faculty of WSU in 1978. In addition to his work with thisNSF-funded biocomplexity project, Kohler has directed excavations in BandelierNational Monument in New Mexico. He is an external faculty member at theSanta Fe Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and a research associate at the CrowCanyon Archaeological Center in Colorado.Illustration by Nicolle Rager Fuller, National Science Foundation.Computer simulations helpscientists answer questionsthat archaeologicalevidence alone cannot.Researchers simulatedthe settlement and farmableland patterns of thePuebloan people living inArizona’s Long House Valleyfrom 1170 A.D. to 1305A.D. and then comparedthe models (upper) witharchaeological evidence ofactual settlement patternsin the region (lower). Themodels closely matched thearchaeological record untilabout 1300 A.D. Both showchanges that coincide witha drought during the late 1200s. However, the model did not predict what happened around 1300 A.D.,when the Puebloans completely abandoned the Long House Valley. Simulations indicate the region couldhave supported a small number of settlements. Environmental conditions alone cannot explain why theregion was abandoned abruptly 700 years ago, leading researchers to conclude that the change was due tosocial, political, or other factors not included in the model.September 2005 | 9