Evolution and Prehistory: The Human Challenge

William A. Haviland is professor emeritus at the University of Vermont, where he founded the Department of Anthropology and taught for 32 years. He holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania. He has carried out original research in archaeology in Guatemala and Vermont; ethnography in Maine and Vermont; and physical anthropology in Guatemala. This work has been the basis of numerous publications in national and international books and journals, as well as in media intended for the general public. His books include The Original Vermonters, coauthored with Marjorie Power, and a technical monograph on ancient Maya settlement. He also served as consultant for the award-winning telecourse Faces of Culture, and he is co-editor of the series Tikal Reports, published by the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Besides teaching and writing, Dr. Haviland has lectured to many professional and nonprofessional audiences in Canada, Mexico, Lesotho, South Africa, and Spain, as well as in the United States. He served as expert witness for the Missisquoi Abenaki of Vermont in an important court case over aboriginal fishing rights. Dr. Haviland was named University Scholar by the Graduate School of the University of Vermont in 1990; received a Certificate of Appreciation from the Sovereign Republic of the Abenaki Nation of Missisquoi, St. Francis/Sokoki Band in 1996; and was given a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Center for Research on Vermont in 2006. Now retired from teaching, he continues his research, writing, and lecturing from the coast of Maine. He serves as a trustee for the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor, focused on Maine's Native American history, culture, art, and archaeology. His most recent books are At the Place of the Lobsters and Crabs (2009) and Canoe Indians of Down East Maine (2012). Harald E.L. Prins is a University Distinguished Professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University. Academically trained at half a dozen Dutch and U.S. universities, he previously taught at Radboud University (Netherlands), as well as Bowdoin College and Colby College in Maine, and was a visiting professor at the University of Lund, Sweden. Named a Distinguished University Teaching Scholar, he received numerous honors for his outstanding academic teaching, including the Presidential Award in 1999, Carnegie Professor of the Year for Kansas in 2006, and the AAA/Oxford University Press Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching of Anthropology in 2010. His fieldwork focuses on indigenous peoples in the Western Hemisphere, and he has long served as an advocacy anthropologist on land claims and other native rights. In that capacity, Dr. Prins has been a key expert witness in both the U.S. Senate and Canadian courts. His numerous academic publications appear in seven languages, and his books include The Mi'kmaq: Resistance, Accommodation, and Cultural Survival. Also trained in filmmaking, he was president of the Society for Visual Anthropology, and coproduced award-winning documentaries. He has been the visual anthropology editor of American Anthropologist, co-principal investigator for the U.S. National Park Service, international observer in Paraguay's presidential elections, and a research associate at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. Dana Walrath, an award-winning writer, artist and anthropologist, is a faculty member of University of Vermont's College of Medicine. After earning her PhD in medical and biological anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania, she taught there and at Temple University. Dr. Walrath broke new ground in paleoanthropology through her work on the evolution of human childbirth. She has also written on a wide range of topics related to gender in paleoanthropology, the social production of sickness and health, sex differences, genetics, and evolutionary medicine. Her work has appeared in edited volumes and in journals such as Current Anthropology, American Anthropologist, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, and Anthropology Now. Her books include Aliceheimer's, a graphic memoir, and Like Water on Stone, a verse novel. She developed a novel curriculum in medical education at the University of Vermont's College of Medicine that brings humanism, anthropological theory and practice, narrative medicine, and professionalism skills to first-year medical students. Dr. Walrath also has an MFA in creative writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and has exhibited her artwork in North America and Europe. Her recent work in the field of graphic medicine combines anthropology with memoir and visual art. Spanning a variety of disciplines, her work has been supported by diverse sources such as the National Science Foundation, the Templeton Foundation, the Centers for Disease Control, the Health Resources and Services Administration, the Vermont Studio Center, the Vermont Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She spent 2012-2013 as a Fulbright Scholar at the American University of Armenia and the Institute of Ethnography and Archaeology of the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia. She is working on a second graphic memoir that combines her Aliceheimer's work with her fieldwork on aging and memory in Armenia.