Conference Agenda

Interactions between Black and Japanese people have been recorded since the 16th century, as European trading ships brought Black slaves and workers to Japanese ports. Since then, Black people in Japan have been subject to fits of awe, disgust, and ambivalence, with the most recent iteration seeming to be an appropriation of Black culture through stereotypical dress and behaviors. Meanwhile, in response to Japan’s demographic crisis, local governments have begun promoting multiculturalism. As a result, a noticeable amount of Black people are living in Japan, some being born there while others moved later on in life– part of a new African diaspora from West Africa and the United States. This research is concerned with what is causing this shift and if racial ideology in Japan has evolved once again. What is the Black experience in contemporary Japan? Although Black people have made multiple contributions to the culture, racial discourse, and feminism of Japan, there is very little literature on their resilience .To remedy this informational gap, I have been conducting a literature review in preparation for studying in Japan to explore these questions.

Oral narrative collections are crucial for preservation of past communities’ cultures. The

West Side of Saratoga Springs, NY was home to a dynamic immigrant working class. The West Side Oral Narrative Project (WSONP) is a collection of oral narratives that, when analyzed, displays shared beliefs, experiences, and pasts, revealing intersubjectivity. Doing so offers insight into shared cultural interactions and conversations within the WSONP that no longer exist. Its purpose is to spread awareness and preserve their intersubjectivity. The people of the West Side had colorful lives and created a vibrant community which we are able to learn about when listening to their stories. Preserving their stories humanizes them in a way that mainstream history cannot. This project demonstrates the importance of shared memories and places (intersubjectivity) amongst family of the immigrant working class in an influential town by exploring the linguistic patterns and social interactions of their tight-knit community.

Communities of color and low-income individuals are disproportionately burdened by environmental hazards. Through local media coverage, this study analyzes the medical and social impacts of chronic water contamination on Southside Tucson, AZ, a predominantly low-income and Hispanic community. In the 1980s, residents were exposed to 1,4-Dioxane and Trichloroethylene (TCE) from a nearby Superfund Site, an EPA designated area where environmental toxicants pose a risk to human health. Using archival analysis of news articles from six sources dated over the last four decades, this study observes the discourse surrounding medical conditions and activism. Findings suggest that health conditions were discussed primarily by community members, ranged in severity, and were felt by children first. Additionally, findings suggest that the passive role of the government was a mobilizing force for mothers to take action into their own hands and create community-led task-forces.

Tourism is often criticized for its exploitation of the destination country's resources and culture. This paper explores the relationship between cultural values of reciprocity, communal land tenure systems, and the development of tourism in the Independent State of Sāmoa, investigating whether local ownership and community-focused practices can limit the unchecked development of tourism and thus, the exploitation of land and culture. The research used qualitative interviews with local business owners on Savai’i island and the chair of the Samoan Tourism Authority, focusing on their motivations, land-use practices, and the relationships influencing operations. Findings show how cultural resilience helps balance economic benefits from tourism development and cultural preservation. The study also shows how locally-owned businesses foster local development by employing locals, supporting surrounding vendors, and stewarding land for future generations. Sāmoan tourism practices are ideal examples of how cultural resilience can support sustainable tourism development.

The Grandmother’s Cabin Site was recently discovered and investigated by a collaborative team involving Adelphi and Chickaloon Village Traditional Council (CVTC), the local Atna Dene community near the Chickaloon river in Matanuska, South Central Alaska. The initial identification of the site was based on collaboration and cooperation between neighbors in Chickaloon. Oral history was also critical in correctly confirming the site location, and excavation has revealed material remains consistent with oral histories of CVTC. During field investigations a previously unknown lithic workshop was identified. Lithic cataloging and cleaning has been ongoing in the Adelphi University Archaeology Lab, as well as preliminary characterization of the lithics. Our results indicate that microblades are present, a technology which has survived in Alaska since the end of the Pleistocene. The raw material source is unknown but may be local, and activities related to lithics at the site primarily include initial core reduction. As one of the oldest sites in the watershed, this lithic analysis contributes to a broader interpretation of life in the Holocene at a site where Dene families have lived for millennia.

This study analyzes how the intersecting cultural values and familial expectations of West Virginians impact ideas of success for working class families in the Kanawha County area of West Virginia, a region with a unique socioeconomic and cultural landscape. The study looks at the culture of identity based on work, class, and family that pervades the state and their impacts on economic stability, educational outcomes, and other life outcomes for family members. This research is conducted through qualitative interviews with parents/guardians and their children from working class families around the state, as well as incorporating lived experience. By asking questions regarding familial expectations, loyalties, economic identities, and analyzing social structures from which participants are, the study examines the relationship between cultural values, familial expectations, economic pressures, social support systems, and life outcomes. This research contributes to a better understanding of the culture in West Virginia that perpetuates poorer educational and economic outcomes when compared to the rest of the United States and provides crucial information to implement plans to improve this.

 

Art has been used less and less in scientific fields since the advent of photography. The non-photographic visualizations produced in this study focus on archaeological finds from a variety of sites in the American Northeast, including Lake George Battlefield State Park in New York state. This body of work reflects the ability of illustrations, reconstructions, and mapping to communicate ideas and invite collaboration between artists, academics, and the public. Scientific illustrations of artifacts, stylized reconstructions, and site maps were produced during this year-long study to demonstrate how illustrations can combine the best qualities of photography and diagrams to help boost audience comprehension, whether academic or not, and how reconstructive art affects our perception of the past, making it an important tool for combatting and correcting biases. By exploring the use of artistic visualizations in archaeology, academics and collaborators can produce minimally-biased, clear communication for a wide audience.

The proposed poster will highlight an anthropology-nature immersion experience in which college-student interns at Commonwealth university prepared, planned, and executed anthropological and archaeological educational experiences at several summer camps for children in Northeastern Pennsylvania. The University students taught cultural history, archaeological techniques, ecological lessons, and leadership skills as part of being camp councilors and nature center fellows.

The development of this anthropological-archaeological internship program was inspired by teaching archaeology as a collaborative experience so that children and college students learned the methods and theory of anthropological-archaeology together. This learning program continues a tradition of collaboration between the university and community organizations. I will show the challenges and successes of this program.

While music has generally been understood as a unifying practice, many aspects of it, such as training, performance, and patronage are largely concentrated within elite populations. Early musical theorists such as Pythagoras, Aristoxenus, and Alypius emphasized the mathematical order of music as a reflection of universal harmony since before 400 B.C. Because of this longstanding unifying connection, the patterns of such aspects of music reveal a complicated relationship between traditional practices and class status. Drawing on analyses of classical theoretical sources in music, and comparative case studies of musical training and patronage structures, this study examines how musical practice has functioned as a bonding cultural force while also being a mechanism of social stratification. In analyzing this relationship between musical knowledge, access, and class status across societies, this study reveals the tension between music’s symbolic universality and its material concentration within elite institutions.

Humans have always survived by working together—sharing food, knowledge, and techniques across generations. In archaeology, this collaboration now extends beyond people to disciplines, especially between anthropology and chemistry. This paper explores how recent advances in biomolecular and isotopic analysis allow archaeologists to reconstruct ancient foodways with remarkable specificity, transforming pottery vessels into molecular archives of cooperation, subsistence, and cultural change. Drawing on compound-specific radiocarbon dating of fatty acids by Casanova et al. (2022), this study highlights how 14C analysis of dairy lipids preserved in ceramic walls provides direct chronological evidence for the emergence of dairying among the first farmers of Central Europe. Rather than estimating from animal bones alone, researchers can now date the milk itself—chemistry anchoring cuisine to time.

Recent methodological innovations outlined by Vykukal et al. (2024) and Irto et al. (2022) demonstrate how improvements in chromatography, mass spectrometry, and lipid extraction techniques refine the identification of fats, oils, and degraded food residues. Experimental archaeology further strengthens interpretation: Miller et al.’s (2020) year-long cooking experiment reveals how visible and absorbed residues accumulate and chemically transform through repeated use, showing that pots record long culinary biographies rather than single meals. Expanding analytical reach, Ordoñez-Araque et al. (2024) demonstrate the feasibility of detecting both fatty acids and starches in minute archaeological fragments, enabling reconstruction of mixed plant and animal diets from even microscopic samples. At the same time, Whelton et al. (2021) urge caution, emphasizing issues of contamination, degradation, and palimpsest effects, reminding scholars that chemical signatures require contextual and methodological rigor.

Case studies ranging from early European dairying to pastoralist pottery, medieval Icelandic vessels, and South Asian dairy residues illustrate how molecular evidence illuminates broader patterns of agricultural transition, mobility, and economic specialization. These findings show that food was never merely sustenance; it structured trade, labor divisions, and social identity. Through lipid biomarkers, stable carbon and nitrogen isotopes, and compound-specific dating, archaeologists can now trace when communities shifted from fishing to dairying, when pastoralists integrated crops into their economies, and how culinary practices reflected adaptation to environmental and social pressures.

Aligned with this year’s conference theme of collaboration, cooperation, and connection, this research demonstrates that understanding ancient diets depends upon interdisciplinary partnership. Chemistry and anthropology together reveal that cooking practices were collective acts shaped by shared knowledge and environmental negotiation. By integrating laboratory science with archaeological theory, we gain a layered understanding of how food connected communities across time. Ultimately, these molecular traces deepen public awareness and preservation efforts by showing that even the smallest potsherd contains a story of cooperation—between humans, landscapes, and now, between scientific disciplines themselves.

Contributions of archaeological methods and theory to the study of eighteenth-century settler-colonial farmsteads in New England remain comparatively sparse, especially when measured against documentary histories of town formation. Yet the eighteenth century in southeastern Connecticut was a formative period of farmstead establishment, marked by inland movement, increasing household autonomy, and an ideological shift toward self-sufficient farming. Farmsteads became household-centered places of defense, ownership, social signaling, food production, education, and technological practice. At the same time, they were embedded in systems of unequal power that structured access to land and labor, including the exploitation and dispossession of Indigenous North Americans and the labor of Africans and African Americans. If historical sources emphasize land transactions and inheritance, archaeology allows us to interrogate how everyday agrarian life was materially organized on the ground.

Our research asks: how can archaeological methods and data contribute to a fuller and more nuanced understanding of eighteenth-century agrarian lifeways? In glaciated and hilly coastal southern New England landscapes, three dominant land-use types—woodlot, pasture, and tilled lands—structured farm production and degrees of ecological alteration. Differentiating between these different forms of land use, we argue, requires a decidedly multivariate and multiscalar analytic approach. In this presentation, we highlight several lines of archaeological evidence emergent in the comparative study of how labor was organized across two farms, with emphasis on the Waterhouse Farm (1733–1817), a 46-acre farmstead featuring 13 wall-delineated fields in southeastern Connecticut. Data include: the distribution of wall-stored stone removed from fields; varying types of in-field stone concentrations; wall alignments and barways; architectural features; and, artifact collections documented through systematic surface and subsurface testing. Notably, we introduce a spatial analysis of terrain hydrography, slope, soil type, and solar exposure using raster GIS.

This combination of archaeological datasets, we argue, offer insights into how agrarian life was materially achieved, the extent to which it was truly “self-sufficient”, and the ways in which the organization of labor and land changed over the course of the eighteenth century. Even more ‘high resolution’ archaeological approaches may be useful for critically analyzing the extent to which generalizations of agrarian lifeways come at the expense of important variability in household social standing, economic resources, and concomitant dispositions to organizing labor and working the land.

Questions surrounding Irish culture and the role of memory in cultural identity have only become more concentrated over the decades. Media, tourism, and inherited identity have created a sense of belonging in many Irish Americans’ lives, but how similar can this culture be when it is nurtured by people with geographical displacement and no lived experience?

This poster presentation aims to understand ways in which individuals in both groups identify and understand Irish culture in their lives. Comparative analysis of Irish Americans and Irish people with lived experience will identify the cultural elements that are prioritized and how they are cultivated and preserved for future generations. Expected findings include Irish tendencies to value lived cultural landscapes and aspects of culture relating to the social life unique to Ireland, including the community surrounding music, sports, pub culture, and religion. In contrast, it is suspected that Irish Americans appreciate romanticized elements of Irish culture, history and folklore that force a narrative of adversity, as well as tangible elements of culture—clothing, jewelry, food, and household objects—that display one’s cultural identity.

Furthermore, literature analysis and research through cultural heritage organizations and interpretive centers will aid in understanding how historical and cultural interpretation is nurtured and who decides what is reinforced for public perception, contributing to wider discussions of misplaced identity and diaspora communities’ methods of cultural preservation. The assumption is that there will be many aspects of Irish culture and folklore that have faded from modern cultures due to lack of oral tradition, tourist engagement or institutional interest.

The Museo Arqueológico de La Serena (MUARSE) in Chile houses osteological collections of profound significance, representing the Late Archaic (ca. 3000 YBP) and formative periods (Molle, 2300-1200 YBP; Animas, ca. 1100-1000 YBP; and Diaguita, 1000-500 YBP) of Chile's semi-arid north. The collections, spanning a wide geographical range of archaeological sites, are notable for their mostly intact state of preservation. This condition offers a unique opportunity for comprehensive osteological and paleopathological analyses, but only if the remains themselves are stabilized and protected.

This presentation outlines the collaborative conservation project between Rowan University and MUARSE, designed to address critical shortcomings in the storage and handling of these human remains. Initial assessments revealed challenges including improper storage facilities, lack of organization, and past use of inappropriate preservation techniques, all of which threatened the long-term integrity of the collection and the accuracy of future research.

Our efforts have been focused on creating and putting into practice improved, moral conservation practices. These techniques involve properly labeling with acid-free materials, carefully cleaning the remains using soft tools, and creating a new storage system with padded boxes and protective bags. Determining the Minimum Number of Individuals (MNI) for a number of mixed assemblages isa crucial step for all ensuing bioarchaeological analysis, and has been a major result of this rehousing operation.

This conservation project has several advantages. It immediately makes it possible to analyze and identify cultural behaviors and paleopathologies, including signs of trauma, signs of occupational stress, and changes to the cranium and teeth. By keeping the collections stable and well-organized, we are guaranteeing that they will continue to be accessible for both future analytical methods and current bioarchaeology and forensic science research topics. This research highlights the vital significance of collaboration between academic and museum institutions for the most ethical and efficient stewardship of our common human history and demonstrates a potent link between the past and present by connecting ancient populations with contemporary science.

Motherhood comes in many forms. This project examines motherhood as a flexible social practice, focusing on adoption, childcare, and kinship within a contemporary American family. It explores how adoption reshapes family dynamics, emotional labor, and maternal identity, particularly within the context of racial difference and the persistent gendered expectations placed on mothers in the United States. Using a feminist ethnographic framework and a life-history methodology, I focus on a series of in-depth interviews with a white, middle-class mother living in suburban Massachusetts who has raised both biological and adopted children. By foregrounding lived experience, we can focus on how maternal labor remains both naturalized and undervalued, even as family forms diversify. Life-history models are a powerful way to reclaim mothers’ voices from abstract discourse and reveal motherhood not as a singular or static role, but as an evolving practice shaped by care, inequality, and connection.

Does a dining experience have to be limited to simply eating food, or can it express or embody greater values? The Dizzy Chicken restaurant’s main mission is to redefine barbecue by using fresh ingredients and globally inspired dishes, while owner Justin Bartlett’s vision is supported by a dedicated staff. Beyond food, the restaurant actively works to support the local community, establish itself within the West Side neighborhood of Saratoga Springs, and contribute to the ongoing history of the space it occupies. Using ethnographic methods including interviews, participant observation, photography, mapping, and external research, this study examines how everyday interactions reveal three central themes of community engagement, the development of a shared local identity, and the importance of place based history. These findings show how a small business can function as a social hub where food, relationships, and local memory come together to create a strong sense of belonging.