Steve Bozarth Steve Bozarth had another busy year studying pollen and opal phytoliths from sites in the American Southwest, northern Belize, and the Great Plains. He was senior author in an article in Journal of Archaeological Science that describes his biosilicate analysis of residue in Maya dedicatory cache vessels from Blue Creek, Belize. He found that the ancient Maya were placing squash, corn, and palm fruits in ceramic vessels as offerings to their gods. The most unexpected discovery was the placement of marine sponges and red ochre in many of the vessels. He was co-author in an article in Ancient Mesoamerica that included his phytolith analysis of a Preclassic royal garden at Nakbé in the northern Peten of Guatemala. He determined that corn and gourds were grown in the terraced garden. Steve assisted Bill Johnson and his Quaternary Studies class in taking a sediment core from Big Basin in Clark County, KS. He is currently analyzing pollen and phytoliths from the core to reconstruct the paleoenvironment of the area.
Planning the move of the Atmospheric Science Program from the Physics Department to Geography made the past year busier than normal for Dave Braaten, but well worth it. He is looking forward to being in Lindley Hall starting in January 2004, and he is especially happy about adding a new atmospheric science faculty member to the Department in August 2004. Dave spent part of this past summer up on the Greenland ice sheet conducting experiments that are part of the PRISM (Polar Radar for Ice Sheet Measurements) Project that he is part of. They were hosted by the Danish led NorthGRIP ice core drilling project, and they were there when the ice core they were drilling became the longest ice core ever to be drilled in Greenland (>3054 m). Their radar and communications experiments were successful, and he will be part of more Greenland field work this coming summer at the U.S. sponsored Summit Camp.
Chris Brown and his wife Denise Perpich proudly announce the birth of their son, Jason Caetano Brown, on April 3, 2003. Besides enjoying his new role as a father, Chris will submit an NSF proposal with Kevin Price to study the expansion of soybean cultivation in the Brazilian Amazon in a collaborative project with Wendy Jepson at Texas A&M. Chris's NSF-funded project on the effect of sustainable development grant funding to colonist farmers, rubber tappers and indigenous groups in Rondonia, Brazil, will end in the coming year. Chris also received a nomination for the 2003 HOPE award.
This year was relatively uneventful for Steve Egbert and wife Kathy - even their travels were fairly limited. In the summer they visited Promontory Point National Monument in northern Utah. Steve had read Stephen Ambrose's "Nothing Like It in the World" a year or two ago, so he enjoyed getting to see the place where the transcontinental railroad was completed and to hike along some of the old road bed. Kathy and Steve also traveled to Fairbanks, Alaska, in September for an AmericaView conference held at the University of Alaska campus. On the weekend they were able to go on a tour of Denali National Park and a riverboat cruise on the Chena River just outside Fairbanks. The vastness of the 49th state really is impressive. On the research front, he completed an inventory of non-permitted dams for the state Division of Water Resources and he started a somewhat related project to study the environmental impact of small farm ponds (the latter project in cooperation with Rich Sleezer at Emporia State and Bob Buddemeier at the Kansas Geological Survey). He continues to be involved with several projects that entail agricultural land cover mapping and the development of imagery databases for the state.
The year (2003) started out far away for Johan Feddema. He spent New Year's in the Netherlands with his parents, and then traveled on to Zambia as part of the US State linkage grant between KU and the University of Zambia. While there he toured a copper smelter and set up a sampling scheme and
methodology to assess the impacts of air pollution from smelters on the local environment. Most of this work is being conducted by Everisto Kapungwe, a former game warden and faculty member at the University of Zambia Geography Department. This work continues to develop as Everisto will probably do a dissertation based on his observations. He proposes to map lichen types and abundance in the region to see if he can map the effect of air pollution in the region, not dissimilar to a study Johan did for his Master's degree in Philadelphia using marble tombstones as damage indicators. Johan also ran a workshop on using water budget approaches to evaluate water conservation and environmental issues in Zambia. Overall it was a great trip, and a long awaited return to the continent where he spent much of his childhood. Johan continued his travels, this time with the entire family, as he spent his summer in Boulder, Colorado, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. He is continuing his work on land cover impacts on climate change at NCAR using the Parallel Climate Model as a testbed to address a number of questions related to modeling these impacts. Preliminary results are promising, showing that there are significant differences in model simulation depending on the land cover characterizations used. This work will continue in the future, and he will be headed back there this coming summer. In addition, his work as chair of the Undergraduate Committee has kept him busy, in large part due to the incorporation of Atmospheric Sciences into the program
Peter Herlihy's big news this year is that he and Laura are the proud parents of baby boy Hobbs (Hobson DePan Herlihy, born 9/25/03). Peter, Laura, Simone, and Hobbs are off for Peru and Nicaragua over the spring and summer 2004. Peter and Laura will be teaching and doing research as part of a KU-University of San Marco, Peru, exchange grant funded by the US Department of State. Then, they will live in Bilwi on the Nicaraguan Miskito Coast where Laura has a Fulbright Grant to teach at the indigenous university URACCAN. The edited volume on participatory mapping that Peter edited with Greg Knapp (Chair, UT-Austin) just came out [Human Organization 62(4)]. In addition to his duties as contributing editor of the Handbook of Latin American Studies at the Library of Congress, Peter has also been appointed to the editorial board of the Journal of Latin American Geography. Peter is also happy to report that his first doctoral student, Derek Smith, graduated with honors and now has a post at Careleton University. David Cochran, who is just finishing the first draft of his dissertation, also began a tenure-track position at the University of Southern Mississippi. Roberto Castillo returned to campus this fall to put the final touches on his dissertation before he returns to his post at the University of Costa Rica, while Ratna Radhakrishna returned to campus this fall from her Fulbright grant to Honduras where she completed her dissertation field work.
Fragments ... from George McCleary's fragmented life style! It is hard to keep up with four grandchildren, two in Lawrence and two in Aurora ... Mondays and Fridays are spent at the Freshman-Sophomore Advising Center ... toss in the continuing commitment to the Commencement Committee, as well as service on the College's Committee on Undergraduate Studies and Advising, and there is a lot of time spent in Strong Hall. For even more fun, there is the University's Academic Procedures and Policies Committee. Teaching is split among fun courses and "necessary" ones ... Geography of Wine, Map Conception and Development, Map Projections, and Human Factors. Still active in Scouting ... Pinewood Derby and adult leader training. Managed to finish a series of maps for a book on genocide ... as well as a successful software grant proposal (UCGIS and Intergraph). Presented a paper at the International Cartographic Association meetings in Durban in August ("Beyond Visualization: Mapping Genocide") ... Marilyn and George did some touring: Namibia (Hereroland) and South African wildlife and wineries. What's next ... finish grading ... do the New Year's 24 Event ... get ready for the spring: Behavioral Systems, Maps and Mapping, and Information Design (now incorporating Map Design and a lot of things from human factors). He hopes to see you in Philadelphia at the wine sessions!
In late August, Garth Myers finished five months of fieldwork in Zambia and Tanzania made possible by a Fulbright. During the three months in Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar this past summer, his family enjoyed a lot of beach time while he collected garbage with community groups or visited the dump. You can't beat the Mtoni dump in Dar for sheer beauty, with its glorious multicolored sludges oozing out into the tidal creek below against the backdrop of houses sliding into the trash fire above. Garth hopes to make all this into book number two, and the Dar dump has a good shot of ending up on the cover. Otherwise, the usual sorts of things are happening. Phebe will either finish 5th grade this year or end world hunger. Maybe both. Atlee is 4 and a major reason Garth feels all of his 40 years, particularly when he is awoken before dawn by her thump-thumping down the stairs. He managed to play soccer in the old folks league and actually helped his team win the thing, bruised and all. And after a December trip to New Zealand for the International Conference of Historical Geographers, this Spring Garth added to his woes by becoming Acting Director of the African Studies Center.
Barbara Shortridge has spent much of the last year writing and talking about Great Plains food, but now has switched regions to Appalachia. Surely apple stack cake, ramp dinners, and country ham will make her stomach growl just as chicken-fried steak, kolaches, and bierocks did for the Plains. It's an occupational hazard of working with food data and stories from home cooks all over the country. She has two publications in press: one about Minnesota foods in the Journal of Cultural Geography and another about culinary tourism of Lindsborg, Kansas, and New Glarus, Wisconsin, in a collection to be published by the University of Kentucky Press. A trip to New Orleans at Mardi Gras for the AAG annual meeting added some extra dimensions to Barbara's lectures in urban geography. It's a great city. She also traveled to Austin, Texas, in June for the annual meetings of the Association for the Study of Food and Society and managed to eat twice at Stubb's Bar-B-Q and visit the excellent Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. She is a
board member of ASFS, an interdisciplinary and international professional association, and served on their student paper competition committee this past year. With support from an Anne U. White award from the AAG (a fund designed to enable married couples to do fieldwork together), Barbara and Pete spent their time in the Upper Midwest exploring the influences of ethnicity and isolation upon foodways. They recommend the potica of Sunrise Bakery in Hibbing, Minnesota, donuts and pie almost anywhere on the north shore of Lake Superior, and the Upper Peninsula State Fair in Escanaba. Barbara has been put in charge of our departmental internship program. Look for her appeal elsewhere in this newsletter.
Pete Shortridge spent the spring of 2003 finishing up several long-term projects, the summer traveling, and the fall beginning a new book. He likes the year's symmetry. His term as AAG National Councillor has ended, along with editorial work for the regional-icons chapter in the Encyclopedia of the Midwest (Indiana University Press, 2004), and the writing for a book about the development of urban Kansas (University Press of Kansas, 2004). The new project, inspired by Peirce Lewis's work on New Orleans, will be a geographic "take" on Kansas City. Trip destinations this year have included Salem, Virginia (daughter Kate is an assistant professor of art there at Roanoke College); Austin, Texas (he walked around for three days while Barbara talked food); and the Iron Range country of Minnesota and Michigan where he and Barbara sampled porketta and other local delicacies under the auspices of an Anne White grant from the AAG. His find of the year is the Texas State Cemetery, an invented tradition of lavish proportions where scores of bodies have been reburied to create "the Arlington of Texas."
Obviously, the big change for Terry Slocum is taking over as Chair. As you can see by his cover letter, he certainly had his hands full with a growing department. However, he has found time to continue working on the second edition of his textbook Thematic Cartography and Geographic Visualization, which he is co-authoring with Bob McMaster, Fritz Kessler, and Hugh Howard (all alumni!). They will be wrapping it up this spring. Two of his children are in college (Diane is at KU and Kevin is at Southwest Missouri State), and the other (Danny) is a sophomore at Free State High School. Since the house was a bit empty with Diane and Kevin away, they also have an exchange student from Germany (Joern) with them this year. Joern and Danny are like brothers - during a recent visit to the shoe store, the clerk asked Danny if he expected to get as tall as his brother (Joern is over 6 feet and Danny is only about 5 feet and three inches).
Valery Terwilliger is continuing her mid-life efforts to upgrade her research skills. She is being kept happily if exceedingly busy as a Smithsonian Senior Research Fellow and Visiting Investigator at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. She is learning the latest in stable isotope (and other) methods while studying relationships of phenotypic plasticity in photosynthetic, water, and nutrient use traits to the distributions of oak species. The weather in eastern Maryland has been most accommodating for this project. The first growing season was a record drought whereas this summer was a banner flood season with a small hurricane for a grand finale. Nice conditions for examining the extent to which trees can respond to changes in climate. In addition to this ecological biogeography study, she is also preparing to spend part of the spring in Ethiopia determining good sites for paleoclimate reconstruction in the Middle Awash. She will be collaborating on the Ethiopian project with co-PI Dr. Zewdu Eshetu, who gave a colloquium in the department during the fall of 2000.
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