Nason House News, Summer 2012
NMSU Engineers Without Borders Travels To Bolivia
This summer Engineers Without Borders will be traveling to Bolivia, near the state of Cochabanba to the community of Azerca Cancha to build a suspended pedestrian bridge. The community there is unable to cross the river 5 months out of the year during the rainy season, leaving them without a link to the major towns, medical supplies or a way to take their crops to market. 16 students and 2 faculty members will spend 2 weeks in August building the 49 meter bridge.
They have also built another bridge in Nicaragua last summer in the community of Hondura Azul in the municipality of Condega. Last May 18 students and 2 faculty built a 56 meter pedestrian bridge over a period of 2 weeks.
Engineers Without Borders have also built a small bridge and a potable water well in Chihuahua, Mexico.
For more information, pictures and videos of projects please visit: http://web.nmsu.edu/~ewb/Home.html.
Aggie visits Falkland Islands
Annie Muirhead, who just finished her first year in the Public History
Master’s Program at NMSU, spent two and a half months in the Falkland
Islands. Based in Stanley, she’ worked with the Falkland Islands Museum
and National Trust to catalog, transcribe, and expand their Oral History
Collection. Annie is the first historian outside the Falklands to access
these incredible recordings and she’s planning to base her Master’s Thesis
on what the Islanders have to say for themselves. Her adventures in the
South Atlantic can be read at http://www.anniemuirhead.blogspot.com.
NMSU Anthropology Student Travels to Peru
Ashley Remy has travelled to Marcajirca, Peru, north of Lima, to study bioarchaeology. While there she will examine dental microwear using vinyl soloxane to make teeth impressions from human remains at a 13th-16th funerary site. She will also take impressions from locals, to study wear patterns on teeth. Once the samples have been collected, she will use the EMS lab on the NMSU campus to create 3D images of the teeth in order to compare wear through time and between sex and class. Ashley will in Peru for a month doing this research.
2012 Immigration Policy Conference A Success
NMSU, UNM, and UTEP presented the first annual Immigration Policy Conference entitled “Immigration Policy and Human Rights; Perspectives From Border Communities” June 16-22. The Keynote Speaker, Emmy-award winning journalist Maria Hinojosa presented the documentary “Lost In Detention” followed by a discussion. Other speakers included Dr. Iñigo García-Bryce and Dr. Neil Harvey of NMSU, Dr. Sandra Garabano of UTEP and Dr. Susana Tiano of UNM.
ACLU and Centro de Derechos Humanos del Migrante A.C. visit CLABS
Josefina Lizeth Martinez Torres and Blanca Cynthia Navarrete García of the Juarez-based Centro de Derechos Humanos del Migrante A.C. shadowed their counterparts in the Las Cruces ACLU for a week in July, culminating in a visit to CLABS on July 12. Blanca is an attorney who studied at UACJ and Lizeth is an attorney who also studied at UACJ. The Centro has offices in Juarez as well Agua Prieta, Sonora. The visit was part of a trip to coordinate and strategize with the ACLU’s Regional Center for Border Rights.
SALAS President investigates Mayan ruins
Addison Warner, President of SALAS is in the Mirador Basin area of Northern Guatemala excavating a chultun, or underground storage chamber. These chambers were often used to store water and comestible goods, and later, became burial chambers or refuse pits, making them valuable resources for archaeologists studying Mayan society. Addison will be attempting to determine the dates and uses of a chultun in relation to the surrounding residential and elite structures. Addison also visited the La Danta Pyramid, the largest know structure in the world, in terms of volume.
Honors College Scholarship Recipient Travels to Peru
Ashley Remy applied for and won an Honors College Scholarship to travel to Peru. Her project involved creating dental molds/impressions on various mandibles in which she would then work with Dr. Cook in the EMS lab at NMSU to work with electron microscopy to examine various wear patterns of teeth. By examining teeth one can find diet and health along with gender and tribe identifications and her hope is that after examining to see if there was a difference between individuals with cranial modifications and those without which may help support a theory that cranial modification was more intentional for a higher class. In addition to her project work, Ashley got to help identify bone fragments, work inside of a chullpa, and excavate a pit that consisted of a modified cranial individual along with ceramics, beads, and burned animal bones. Ashley’s project was directed by Dr. Bebel Ibarra and various other professors from around the nation and globe, such as Tulane University and the University of Paris. The site of the project is located in Marcajirca, north of Huari and situated on a small peak. Here there are hundreds of individuals buried in above ground tombs, chullpas, as well as pits and are dated between 12th to 16th century. Camping in extreme conditions and with a crew of various other students from colleges around the United States and Canada, they excavated, surveyed, mapped, and basically examined patterns of the hundreds of bones recovered. Ashley’s main project idea was given to her under the guidance of Dr. Benefit from NMSU.
NMSU Anthropology Professor Takes Sabbatical Leave in Argentina
Between September 2012 and May 2013 Dr. William Walker will be a visiting scholar at the Instituto Nacional de Antropologia y Pensamiento Latinoamericano. He plans to spend the majority of his time writing a book designed to develop new method and theory for archaeological study of religion. Dr. Walker’s writing will be enhanced by the scholarly give and take of my colleagues at the Institute, many of whom he has worked with in research expeditions in northwest Argentina and southwest Bolivia. Although his primary area of archaeological research has been the North American Southwest, particularly the borderlands, he has maintained a long term interest in the southern Andes and is looking forward to the intellectual life of Buenos Aires.