Departmental News

Posted:  Sep 25, 2023 - 12:00pm

Keith Prufer, Professor of Anthropology, has been awarded a Fellowship in residence by the trustees of Harvard University at their Dumbarton Oaks Research Library in Washington DC.  There he will join the Pre-Columbian Studies group which was founded in 1963 to support the study of the art and archaeology of the ancient Americas. This research encompasses cultures that thrived in the western hemisphere from northern Mexico to southern South America, from the earliest times to the sixteenth century.  His writing projects at Dumbarton Oaks will focus on untangling the complex history of early farming in tropical Mesoamerica and to link the earliest plant foods to the development of indigenous cuisines centered around the triad of maize, beans, and squash, supplemented by hundreds of edible plants. Tropical Mesoamerica was long considered a backwater for farming with broadleaf rainforests and savannas unsuitable for sustaining agricultural populations. Today we know the incredible biological diversity of rainforests also reflects the diversity of edible plants, many rich in carbohydrates and plant proteins. Linking food traditions to archaeological reconstructions of plant-use across the Holocene will illustrate the development of globally important food complexes.  Much of the data for these projects has been generated by Dr. Prufer in who is also a core-faculty member at the UNM Center for Stable Isotopes which is part of the UNM Interdisciplinary Sciences Co-op, and with funding from the National Science Foundation and the Alphawood Foundation.  The resources of the Dumbarton Oaks library, which houses one of the largest collections of books, manuscripts, and historical documents on the Pre-Columbian Americas, make for an ideal location to conduct this research.