Department Research and Scholarship

Advancing Ideas and Sharing Research

Anthropology and Geography faculty carry out research and studies around the world, and publish findings in leading journals across our disciplines. View the department's scholarship reports, which detail faculty's recent publications, grants and awards, presentations, and other accomplishments.

Research Spotlight

Andrew Du, Department of Anthropology and Geography, Colorado State University

Du: Questioning the Primacy of Meat-Eating

Assistant Professor Andrew Du is a coauthor on a 2022 study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that calls into question the primacy of meat eating in early human evolution. While archaeological evidence for meat eating increases dramatically about 2 million years ago — following the appearance of Homo erectus — Du and coauthors argue that this increase can largely be explained by greater research attention on this time period, effectively skewing the evidence in favor of the “meat made us human” hypothesis. Science Friday (WNYC), Wired, and other national and international media have reported on the findings.

Andrew Du, Department of Anthropology and Geography, Colorado State University
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Chennault: Investigating Prison Agriculture

Assistant Professor Carrie Chennault is investigating agriculture, food systems, and environmental injustices across hundreds of prisons in the United States in collaboration with Professor of Sociology Joshua Sbicca and colleagues from the CSU Geospatial Centroid. Chennault and Sbicca won a College of Liberal Arts Ann Gill Faculty Development Award for Collaborative Projects in Spring 2022, and Chennault is also part of a Centroid-led team that won a $100,000 NASA Equity and Environmental Justice Grant in Fall 2022.

Prison map square

Henry: Surveying an Early Islamic cemetery in Uzbekistan

Assistant Professor Edward Henry and colleagues have surveyed and excavated one of the earliest documented Islamic burial grounds in Central Asia. Writing in the journal Antiquity, the researchers share their findings from Tashbulak, Uzbekistan, concluding that the surveyed burials conform to Islamic funerary prescriptions and suggest the existence of a funerary community of practice, challenging narratives of Islamic conversion in peripheral areas as a process of slow diffusion. The paper also emphasizes the importance of archaeological approaches for documenting the diversity of Early Islamic communities.

Fisher & Leisz: Creating an Earth Archive

In an Opinion article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Profs. Chris Fisher and Stephen Leisz and colleagues make the case for their ambitious initiative to digitally scan the entire planet for environmental and cultural resources using high-resolution LiDAR. The two professors launched the Earth Archive to carry out their initiative and held a virtual congress among partners and collaborators in 2021.

Department Research, Awards and Presentations