January 2013 UASC Speaker: Dr. Anna Roosevelt
The peopling of the Americas is a topic of perennial interest and changing focus. Since the 1990s, new Paleoindian cultures have turned up in different corners of the Americas. Several of them: in California, the Peruvian Coast, and the Amazon River, are fishing and forest gathering cultures. The speaker discovered the Amazonian culture, some of whose sites are under water, due to the rise in ocean levels after the end of the Ice-Age. In her talk, she will reveal the characteristics of the new early cultures and her expeditions to both cave sites and underwater sites.
A.C. Roosevelt is an anthropologist interested in human evolution, human organization, human rights, and long-term human-environment interaction. Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois, Chicago since 1994. Roosevelt researches human history and prehistory in tropical forest Amazonia and the Congo. Her research has been funded by grants or fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Commission, National Endowments for the Humanities and National Endowme
nt for the Arts, Wenner-Gren, MacArthur Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Royal Geographical Society, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and American Anthropological Association.
Her seven books are Amazonian Indians from Prehistory to the Present (editor, U. Arizona Press), The Ancestors: Native Artisans of the Americas (co-editor with J.G.E. Smith, Museum of the American Indian and U. Washington Press), Moundbuilders of the Amazon (Academic Press), Parmana: Manioc and Maize Subsistence along the Orinoco (Academic Press), The Excavations at Corozal, Venezuela: Stratigraphy and Ceramic Seriation (Yale University Publications in Anthropology), Ancient Lakes: Cultural and Biological Diversity (co-editor with H. Kawanabe and G. Coulter, Kenobi Press), and Amaz'Homme: Sciences de L'Homme et Sciences de La Nature en Amazonie. (co-editor with Egle Barone-Visigalli (Editions Ibis Rouge). She has published more than 95 articles in Science, Nature, Natural History, L'Homme, Man, Geoarchaeology, Quaternary Geochronology, Human Biology, Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture, Quark, La Vanguardia, U. California Press, Colum
She has served several organizations for the advancement of science, education, human rights, ethics, and cultural, historic, and environmental conservation: American Association for the Advancement of Science, European Commission, National Science Foundation, American Anthropological Association Committee on Ethics, Rainforest Alliance, and University of Illinois. Currently she is on the National Academies Committee of the University of Illinois and the Honors College, the Human Rights Watch Chicago Committee, and the European Research Council. 05/2011bia U. Press, Harvard U., Cambridge U. Press, Academic Press, etc.
