SAR board member and eminent archaeologist, Jerry Sabloff has devoted considerable effort to the study of settlement patterns in Mexico and Central America—the when, where and how non-elite Maya people lived and worked. Sabloff discusses his discoveries in a Q&A interview in the 2019 issue of Knowable Magazine and presents on the topic in this fall’s SAR In-Depth course.
At the heart of her research, SAR senior scholar Dean Falk asks, “What can fossils, babies, and Einstein tell us about the way our brains have evolved?” Falk addressed this question and more during a tour of lectures and interviews across western Australia this summer, where, on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) Radio program “Late Night Live”, she touches upon evolution and language, the uniqueness of Einstein’s brain, and “hobbits”, or the newly discovered (and short) human species, Homo floresiensis.
Ruined great houses, corn kernels and bones—these are just some of the archeological fragments that have offered researchers new insights into how Middle San Juan Puebloan peoples lived in the 12th and 13th centuries. Featured earlier this year in the Santa Fe New Mexican’s Pasatiempo, the book Aztec, Salmon, and the Puebloan Heartland of the Middle San Juan covers these topics and more as eleven contributing writers examine new evidence that helps shed light on the settlements.
Kelli Jo Ford, SAR’s 2016 Indigenous writer in residence’s Crooked Hallelujah will be published by Grove Atlantic in 2020, and one of the stories received the 2019 Plimpton Prize for Fiction from the Paris Review. Read more about Ford’s project and time at SAR.
Cities are shaped as much by paper and rubber stamps as they are by bricks and mortar, argues Matthew Hull in Government of Paper. By tracing the unexpected ways in which documents travel, he exposes the secret life of paper that profoundly shapes the built landscape of the planned city of Islamabad, and more broadly, gives us new ways of understanding bureaucracy on a global scale.
Director of SAR’s scholar programs, Paul Ryer, shares stories from his research into what it means to be Cuban and how residents of Cuba perceive the world and their role in it.
A new, widely acclaimed book by SAR scholar alumnus David Treuer is challenging long-held views of the state of Native America. The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, argues that Dee Brown’s famous history of Native American dispossession and genocide, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, perpetuates a mistaken impression of the situation of American Indians today.
This week, the Washington nonprofit, Artist Trust, announced Casandra Lopez, SAR’s 2013 Indigenous Writer-in-Residence, as the recipient of the 2018 James W. Ray Venture Project award. Given to two individuals annually, the award honors creatives who the Trust believes demonstrate exceptional originality.
Gordon Lee Johnson writes primarily to tell the stories of today’s California Indian, but he is also interested in addressing the universal human condition. Johnson was SAR’s 2017 Indigenous Writer-in-Residence and was recently featured in a Los Angeles Times article on California Native American artists and the struggle to preserve their culture in the modern world.
The immersive film Voices of the Rainforest spans a day in the life of the Kaluli people in their Bosavi rainforest home in Papua New Guinea, highlighting the sounds of the animals, insects and natural world that the Kaluli believe speak of their ancestors.