Interdisciplinary Humanities graduate student Gina Palefsky has been awarded a highly competitive Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. The foundation supports research in all sub-fields of anthropology, and Ms. Palefsky's project is a bioarchaeological study in keeping with the work of her dissertation advisor Prof. Christina Torres-Rouff. Entitled "Embodied Boundaries: A Bioarchaeological Approach to Foodways and Community Organization in Metal Age Central Thailand (c. 1100 BCE - CE 500)," this study will analyze mortuary populations from four archaeological sites in central Thailand to investigate how community organization changed in response to complex social processes of contact and immigration during the Metal Age. Ms. Palefsky seeks to characterize changes in community organization in terms of immigration and biological relationships and assess how foodways may have united or divided Metal Age people across lines of biocultural identity.
