Photo at right:
“The terra cotta warriors and horses is a collection of 8,099 life-size figures of located near the Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor. The figures were discovered in 1974 near Xi’an, Shaanxi province.”
Preserving the Past
Photo of terra cotta warriors from the tomb of China’s Qin Shi Huang by Richard Mallinson
Insight into the past is essential for understanding the present. As we move into research areas that require a large-scale perspective, such as international conflict and governmental rule, we would have no solid framework for understanding these complicated issues without historical context.
SBS scholars uncover and interpret the events, societies and languages of the past: to historians analyzing women’s role in desegregation in the 1950s, to linguists preserving dying Native American languages, to archaeologists revealing the complex foraging and pastoral societies of 10,000 years ago. In revealing the past, we learn more about the human condition.
Scholars in linguistics and the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology (BARA) are documenting, preserving and revitalizing endangered Native American languages. In fact, as part of the Documenting Endangered Languages (DEL) project, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) recently gave the UA more grants and fellowships than any other institution in the country.
UA anthropologists have discovered that archaic Neanderthal humans and anatomically modern people co-existed for thousands of years. Researchers studied animal bones and cultural remains to help develop the theory that modern humans didn’t simply kill off their Neanderthal cousins, as is commonly assumed, but actually interbred.
A UA historian has uncovered multiple strategies used by Japanese to perpetuate their families. For hundreds of years, parents have chosen only one heir - usually the oldest son - and required him to live with them and his wife. Parents lacking a suitable heir adopt a daughter’s husband. The adopted son-in-law assumes his wife’s surname. The fifth generation of the family studied even bypassed their own biological son, who was disabled, and adopted an outsider as their heir. Such adopted heirs often proved more competent in advancing the family’s interests than children related by blood.
A UA historian has examined the politics of racial borders evidenced in the school desegregation crisis in Little Rock, Ark., 1950-1964. Her work has made women’s activism central to an understanding of segregationist politics and of gender differences in racial views among middle-class whites. Middle-class white women pressured Little Rock’s civic elite to move faster on school desegregation and to create interracial community boards so as to give African Americans a political voice.
UA archaeologists have begun to decode the Ice Age ebb and flow of ancestral human populations across some of the highest and driest territories on Earth in Tibet and Mongolia.
A UA anthropologist has created a model called SAIL, “Simulated Agents in Love,” which simulates patterns of gene flow that are affected by kinship and migration patterns. SAIL provides a tool that interprets genetic data on patterns of relatedness for both male and female lineages. Y-chromosome data obtained from 551 Balinese men suggests that the prehistoric colonization of Bali was far more complex than predicted by current models of human expansion.
A researcher in BARA is working with UNESCO to document African forms of archaeo-astronomy and indigenous astronomy and to identify sites important to scientific discoveries in astronomy. These sites will be nominated as World Heritage sites and preserved for all of humanity.
Enola Gay, a U.S. Army Air Force B-29 bomber, dropped the first atomic bomb ever used in warfare on Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945, during World War II.
A UA historian has studied the controversy surrounding the display of the Enola Gay at the Smithsonian in the 1990s. Veterans, congressmen and curators attempted to work together, but their conflicting memories of the plane’s meaning - initiator of the Cold War, destroyer of cities and hundreds of thousands of people, harbinger of the war’s end - resulted in discord. Her work examines collective memory and how the past remains an unstable object of study.
A Judaic Studies scholar is working on the publication of the results from her excavations in Israel. The publication of the Tell el-Wawiyat Excavation Project is designed to inform people about life in a small rural site in the Lower Galilee and contribute to the ongoing discussion of the transition from Canaanite to Israelite in a relatively unexplored part of the country.
A Judaic Studies scholar explains the behavior of a handful of penurious travelers of Jewish origin who were tried by the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions in the 17th century. Their crime was having themselves repeatedly baptized, and, in some cases, presenting themselves as expert Jewish indoctrinators. By examining unpublished and under-explored Inquisitorial documents, the UA scholar reveals that the actions of these transients were not exotic. Rather, they replicated and, on occasion, parodied cultural models found among contemporary diasporic Sephardic Jews.
A Judaic Studies scholar is trying to recover the voices of the religious communities that were silenced in the biblical record. Although the Bible portrays King Manasseh as the most wicked of all the kings of Israel and Judah, the professor portrays him as the proponent of the vibrant religious diversity that characterized ancient Judah, the diversity that subsequent monotheistic reforms and the final editors of the Bible tried to eliminate.
The Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies has raised just over $1 million toward its $2 million goal to endow a professorial chair in honor of the late Heiko A. Oberman, and thereby acquire his research library - a valuable collection of over 10,000 volumes, including rare 16th- and 17th-century imprints - for The University of Arizona Library.
A researcher in the Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies is investigating where modern stereotypes of the emotional and expressive differences among Catholics and Protestants began. She is finding that preachers of the 16th and 17th centuries held out to their listeners distinctly contrasting models of religious and social comportment depending on whether they were Catholic, Lutheran or Calvinist. She has found that intensely anti-Jewish passion sermons, preached every Easter season in all three denominations, may well have served as a vehicle for the maintenance of anti-Semitic feeling into the 20th century.
Tohono O’odham rain dance at the Feast of the Sacred Heart in Covered Wells, Ariz. A UA linguist works to document and maintain the Tohono O’odham language.
A professor in the School of Information Resources and Library Science (SIRLS) investigated the historical roles of 19th- and early-20th-century African Americans whose involvement in print cultural history is used to study their efforts to document African American history and culture and to engage in social activism.
A SIRLS professor is researching public libraries’ role in the construction of race through the creation of segregated collections and services in the early-20th century South.
A Women’s Studies scholar has explored the history of interracial and intercountry adoption from about 1945 to the early 1990s. She examined how adoption participated in producing the sentimental ties that helped support an interventionist U.S. foreign policy in the postwar period; how it refigured race and kinship relations; and how transnational and transracial adoption were transformed from liberal anti-racist activism in the 1960s to neoconservative, some would say racist, policy in the 1990s.
Baby Doe Tabor: Uncovering Lizzie’s Voice from Beneath the Legend is an intensive study by a Women’s Studies scholar of the passionate private writings of this infamous Colorado mining frontier woman. The study disrupts previous views of Baby Doe as a home-wrecker and madwoman, showing her instead to be a mindful mother deeply devoted to her daughters and her God.
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