Chris Beekman, Associate Professor and Chair of Anthropology, recently returned from a productive sabbatical. In addition to making significant progress on his own book, he published a co-edited volume with Robert Pickering (of the Gilcrease Museum) Shaft Tombs and Figures in West Mexican Society: A Reassessment. This book examines ceramic effigies of human beings that were used in ritual display in western Mexico about 2000 years ago and sometimes interred with the dead as part of burial.  The book is the scholarly accompaniment to a show at the Gilcrease Museum for which Beekman was a consultant. Beekman also published a chapter in the book Political Strategies in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica (edited by Sarah Kurnick and Joanne Baron) discussing the evidence for contrasting strategies pursued by elites in ancient Jalisco. In addition, Beekman presented invited papers at the Colegio de Michoacán in Mexico, and at the Society for American Archaeology conference in Orlando, FL, and presented on his research at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C.