KNOWLEDGE MOBILITY

The international aspect of my research builds capacity through cross-disciplinary training, community educational engagement, and greater access to scientific resources for my colleagues in the countries in which I work. Much of this has included strengthening existing collaborative networks with the University of Dar es Salaam and the Arusha Natural History Museum to promote sustainable paleoanthropological research in Tanzania, but also with local Maasai communities of Oldupai Gorge. I have assisted in the successful PhD applications of four Tanzanian students and supported a close Tanzanian colleague with obtaining an Africa Mobility Grant from the Max Planck Society to travel to Jena, Germany and conduct laboratory analyses and develop new paleoenvironmental reconstruction techniques for his research. I was also a referee for his application to an African Humanities Program Postdoctoral Fellowship through the American Council of Learned Societies, which was just recently awarded.

I also train undergraduate and graduate students from Zimbabwe, Tanzania, China, the United States, Germany, and Canada in archaeological field methods, laboratory protocols, data analysis, and scientific writing. For example, at the Maunganidze site in Zimbabwe, field training programs include traditional excavation and survey techniques, use of a total station, stratigraphic profiling, and artifact identification. One of the major goals of this project was to train students so that they could one day lead their own excavations at archaeological sites in their home country.

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