October 2009 - Please, join Nieves Zedeno in congratulating Kacy Hollenback, who received an award in the amount of $14,959 from the Wenner-Gren Foundation.

Kacy's dissertation proposal is entitled "Disaster, Technology, and Community: Measuring Responses to Smallpox Epidemics in Historic Hidatsa Villages, North Dakota."

Kacy will examine ceramic assemblages dating to three pre-and post epidemic periods as a means to explain how generations of crafts-women and their communities coped with loss of technological knowledge due to attrition. The dissertation will integrate archaeological and ethnohistorical data with contemporary social memory and individual Hidatsa perspectives on smallpox, and thus will make a unique contribution to anthropological theories of disaster and technological change.

(Zedeno and Schiffer, co-chairs, Reid, Pavao-Zuckerman, and Ferguson members)