Join us at our next Department Colloquium, “Deciphering Diets”, presented by Dr. Margaret Bryer – Dec. 4th 4:00 PM

Wednesday, December 4 2024 - Wednesday, December 4 2024 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM

Sabin Hall, G90
3413 N. Downer Ave
Milwaukee, WI 53211

UWM Anthropology SURF Students Present at Annual MAC Conference

A new open-access archaeology lab has just dropped! UWM Support for Undergraduate Research (SURF) students Elsie Touchstone and Rachel Stewart along with their research mentor, Dr. Shannon Freire, presented their co-created Archaeological Dating Lab at the 2024 Midwest Archeological Conference… Read More

The Origins of the Thanksgiving Meal

By Aislinn Sanders As the temperatures drop and snow begins to fall, people are undoubtedly imbued with the classic holiday spirit that comes with this time of year. Thoughts of holiday-specific food and drink, story telling with friends and family,… Read More

Uncovering the Neanderthal Diet

By Aislinn Sanders What Neanderthals ate has been an ongoing debate in research communities. A new study on Neanderthal teeth has attempted to provide an answer to this question. Led by Dr. Klervia Jaouen, a researcher at the Observatory Midi… Read More

North America’s Oldest Skull Surgery

By Aislinn Sanders New findings from bioarcheologist, Diana Simpson, have researchers dating the oldest skull surgery in North America to at least 3,000 years ago. In North Africa, the practice may be as old as 13,000 years old. Prior to… Read More

PhD Candidate Michelle LaBerge Wins First Prize for Dissertation Research

Anthropology PhD candidate Michelle LaBerge has won first prize for a poster on her PhD thesis research at the Iron Age Research Student Symposium, an annual event held in the UK that provides postgraduate researchers with the opportunity to present… Read More

Virtual Colloquium: A Retrospective: Twenty-Eight Years of the Milwaukee County Poor Farm Cemetery Project presented by Dr. Patricia B. Richards

Friday, October 9 2020 2:30 PM

This event will take place virtually via Zoom.

Come join us for our first-ever virtual colloquium presented by Dr. Patricia B. Richards on October 9th at 2:30 PM via Zoom!

A Retrospective: Twenty-Eight Years of the Milwaukee County Poor Farm Cemetery Project

From 1878 through 1974 Milwaukee County utilized four locations on the Milwaukee County Grounds in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin for the burial over 10,000 individuals, primarily paupers, the institutionalized, and the unidentified. Two archaeological excavations in 1991-1992 and again in 2013 resulted in the recovery of over 2,400 individuals from one of those cemetery locations. Curated by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Archaeological Research Laboratory, the Milwaukee County Poor Farm Cemetery (MCPFC) individuals, artifacts, and associated archives represent one of the largest, if not the largest, archaeologically recovered, permanently curated skeletal collections in the United States. In addition to generating a substantial osteological data set, this project offers a model for crossing boundaries between cultural resource management, academic research, and social engagement at a time when the exhumation of the United States’ forgotten historic cemeteries has become increasingly common. As a project focused on a late 19th and early 20th century cemetery, the MCPFCP is situated not only within the history of historical archaeological research but is also influenced by the recent bioarchaeological trend of engaging with social theory to examine social identity and lived social experience. This talk summarizes the project to date within the overarching goal of returning a voice and an identity to individuals robbed of both by burial in the MCPFC.

Patricia Richards

Patricia Richards

Dr. Patricia B. Richards is a senior scientist in the Anthropology Department at UWM. She is also a Principal Investigator for UWM-CRM and has conducted cultural resource studies in Wisconsin, Michigan and Illinois since 1973. Her specialties include mortuary analysis and historic period archaeology in the Great Lakes region. She has served as project director of the Milwaukee County Poor Farm Cemetery Project since the collection was permanently moved to UWM in 2008 and directed the original excavations in 1990s.

How to Attend Meeting:

This meeting will take place virtually via the web conferencing app, Zoom. Please follow the instructions below to attend on the day and time of the colloquium. Thank you.

Join Zoom Meeting at 2:30 PM on October 9th.

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Meeting ID: 310 301 7900
Passcode: 9516145

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Alum Nikita Sessler Werner featured in recent Discover Magazine article

UWM Anthropology is proud to share that Nikita Sessler Werner’s 2019 MS thesis on the archaeological evidence for child labor in prehistoric European mining contexts is featured in the June 2020 issue of Discover magazine. You can read the article… Read More

Archaeological Institute of America Lecture: Dr. Eric H. Cline

Abstract: For more than three hundred years during the Late Bronze Age, from about 1500 BC to 1200 BC, the Mediterranean region played host to a complex international world in which Egyptians, Mycenaeans, Minoans, Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Cypriots, and Canaanites… Read More

PhD candidate Jessica Skinner’s thesis project is featured on the Graduate School’s Research page

PhD candidate Jessica Skinner’s thesis project is featured on the Graduate School’s Research page. Earlier this spring Jessica competed in the first ever 3 Minute Thesis competition at UWM and took second place! Follow the link to the article in… Read More