Graduate Student Research

Nikketa Burges is a second-year graduate student in Medical Anthropology whose work focuses on harm reduction and unsheltered homelessness. Her paper on morbidity and mortality linked to encampment sweeps, written in Fall 2023, was edited, and published in Deceleration in May 2024. She has presented on her work assisting Marty...

Dr. Jamie Hodgkins’ archaeology and biological anthropology students are presenting their thesis projects at the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) and Paleoanthropology Society meetings in Denver this spring! All got a trial run by unveiling their posters at the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences’ annual Research and Creative Works...

Sarah Manassee did fieldwork in Las Animas County with PaleoCultural Research Group last summer, helping the crew perform surveys, site documentation, and an excavation. Most recently, she presented her thesis at the Council of Professional Archaeologists’ annual meeting in Grand Junction and will present new thesis research at the Paleoanthropology...

Sanjuana (“SJ”) Casillas Chavez is currently working on his master’s thesis, which focuses on a zooarchaeological analysis of the Jones-Miller site, a 10,000-year-old bison butchery site of the now-extinct species, Bison antiquus. This assemblage is housed at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and yielded approximately 41,000 bison bones...

Monica Eckels is completing a zooarchaeological analysis of one square of the Jones-Miller Bison kill site, formerly located in Wray, Colorado, for her MA thesis this spring. She presented preliminary findings at the Rocky Mountain Biological Anthropology Conference in October 2024 and a college event in February 2025. She will...

In his eye-catching blog , Kyle Pontieri documents the 2024 excavation season at Boomplaas Cave in South Africa, detailing the experiences of the archaeological team during their fieldwork. Boomplaas Cave, located in the foothills of the Swartberg Mountains in the Klein-Karoo region, has been in use for potentially 80,000 years...

Yael Greenberg is completing a thesis based on 14 interviews with midwives, birth center staff, and key informants to discover the structural and cultural barriers to the reliance on a midwifery model of care in the United States despite ample research demonstrating its efficacy (if not superiority) for low-risk patients...

Helen Maria Olson is conducting a preliminary pXRF analysis of an unusual obsidian artifact from Los Guachimontones, Mexico. Her research aims to determine the object’s sourcing and cultural significance, suggesting it may have been highly valued for special occasions.