Paul Dallaghan is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology. His research project entitled “Breath, stress, and health: a biocultural study of hatha yoga” involves a controlled multicultural subject intervention, registered with clinicaltrials.gov, to assess the effects of engaged practice with breath focus on markers of stress, aging, and mental wellbeing. Paul will teach The Anthropology of Yoga this fall semester at Emory.
You can watch the Interview on Facebook and Twitter.
Just in time for fathers day Jim Rilling’s (Emory Anthropology) fatherhood research is in
the spot light of both Emory News and GPB. The Emory News article Five surprising facts about fathers highlights some of the overlooked challenges that fathers face based on a research project done in collaboration with Craig Hadley (Emory Anthropology). Dr. Rilling previously collaborated in research that was published in 2017 by Dr. Jennifer Mascaro (Emory School of Medicine). She investigated the difference in behavior when fathers interact with daughters or sons, such as a focus on social vocabulary for girls and achievement for boys.
In the GPB interview with Virginia Prescott Rilling gets the chance to talk about the work and findings in detail, the interview is available online.
Now what should you give dad? According to Rilling, subjects found quite some enjoyment in sharing their fatherhood experience.
On March 21st at the Brownwood Park Pavilion, the Department of Anthropology brought archaeology out of the university and into the community as part of the annual Atlanta Science Festival. In “Become an Archaeologist,” children and parents learned about archaeological science, including how to extract DNA, perform chemical residue analysis, and put together artifacts and bones.
Veatch, a graduate student who researches the environmental context of the Late Pleistocene archaeological site Liang Bua in Indonesia, specifically focuses on the rodent remains found in the cave. She remarks on their diversity as a group of mammals helped by the continuity of bones in the cave sequence, which persist over the 190,000-year stretch preserved in the cave.
Read more about the work of Veatch and other researchers in the National Geographic article.
The journal Evolutionary Anthropology is publishing the first overview of prehistoric tool miniaturization, a technology which has been largely overlooked in the stone tool record. The paper, co-authored by current Emory Anthropology post-doc Justin Pargeter, argues that technological miniaturization was a central tendency in hominin technologies going back at least 2.6 million years and may have helped some humans survive climate change during the last period of rapid global climate change.
“Here’s to naps and snoozes.” In his article Todd Pitock summarizes the American culture of sleep and its perceptions of what is considered acceptable and contextualizes it with international examples. He quotes Dr. Worthman who’s research on sleep around the world has shown it as “more flexible and more social” then sleep is considered in the West. Communal sleeping arrangement are more common and can be based on an array of reasons such as comfort or safety, while the West has a tendency to judge sleep by its number of hours spend not being productive.
In a recent publication in the journal Antiquity, Justin Pargeter (a Postdoctoral researcher with Emory University’s Anthropology Department) argues the motivations of prehistoric hunter-gatherers for selecting particular rocks for toolmaking are often explained in too rigidly functional or symbolic terms. By examining the exploitation of crystal quartz at two archaeological sites (Ntloana Tšoana and Sehonghong) in Lesotho, southern Africa, he and his co-author Jamie Hampson (University of Exeter) reveal that stone tool production required a form of engagement unique to crystal quartz’s specific properties (including possibly quartz crystal’s piezoelectric effects). The prefered use of quartz crystals—irrespective of the availability of other rocks for tool production—demonstrates agency and variability in the prehistoric technologies.
