Humanities & Society

A researcher at Washington University in St. Louis travels the Americas, collecting feces from nonhuman primates to determine the risk of Zika reservoirs.

Shanti Parikh, associate professor of sociocultural anthropology and of African and African-American studies in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, led planning for the American Ethnological Society (AES) annual spring meeting, which takes place March 14-16 at the university.

Long before Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook and even MySpace, early Mississippian Mound cultures in America’s southern Appalachian Mountains shared artistic trends and technologies across regional networks that functioned in similar ways as modern social media, suggests new research from Washington University in St. Louis.

PhD candidate Dick Powis likes to joke that if a picture is worth a thousand words, then he should be allowed to submit 100 photographs for his dissertation. His photo is one of many showcased in the Department of Anthropology annual photo contest. Glenn Stone, a professor in Arts & Sciences, started the contest a decade ago to showcase the stunning photography his students bring back from the field.

Prehistoric peasant farmers struggling to put more food on the table fueled the global spread of some of the world’s first and most important domesticated grain crops beginning as early as 7,000 years ago, according to an international study led by anthropologists at Washington University in St. Louis.

A young Neandertal left deaf and partially paralyzed by a crippling blow to the head about 40,000 years ago must have relied on the help of others to avoid prey and survive well into his 40s, suggests a new analysis published Oct. 20 in the online journal PLoS ONE.

Using modern, high-tech analysis tools, anthropologist Michael Frachetti is leading groundbreaking research on an ancient city high in the Uzbekistan mountains. The site may hold clues to how medieval civilizations changed when diverse communities integrated — and even suggest how we might consider our own current initiatives of global community-building.

Lately it’s been fashionable to say that hunter-gatherers lived better than we do. They had more free time, they followed more natural sleep cycles, and so on. But is our picture of hunter-gatherer society right? A giant earth mound in Louisiana suggests we know less than we think. Washington University anthropologist Tristram R. Kidder explains.

Heralded on the cover of Time magazine in 2000 as a genetically modified (GMO) crop with the potential to save millions of lives in the Third World, Golden Rice is still years away from field introduction and even then, may fall short of lofty health benefits still cited regularly by GMO advocates, suggests a new study from Washington University in St. Louis.

What do you do if you are trying to save a very rare and shy animal? How do you even find them? Anthropologist Joseph Orkin, PhD ’14, called in Pinkerton. No, not the detective agency, the dog.