Anthropology Research

Numu Tekwapu: Revitalizing and Teaching the Comanche Language

PI: Dr. Todd McDaniels, Assistant Professor, Comanche Nation College
PI: Dr. Jeff Williams, Professor, TTU

Project Dates: 30 September 2009 through 21 September 2011
Project Funding: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services ($213,000)

Summary: With generous funding from the Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Native Americans, Drs. McDaniels and Williams are working with the Comanche tribe and through Comanche Nation College on a large-scale project to preserve the Comanche language. The project will plan, design, and create multimedia language learning tools as teaching materials to accompany Comanche language courses taught at and through Comanche Nation College. The teaching materials will form part of a comprehensive community plan to revitalize the Comanche language, which according to the most recent community assessment data has fewer than 25 genuinely fluent speakers. Comanche is the heritage language of the approximately 13,000 tribally-enrolled members of the Comanche Nation.

The demand for both Comanche language instruction and learning materials is strong within the Comanche community, especially among adults and elders. The project’s strategy is to involve college-aged students directly in the revitalization efforts since they will be the next generation of parents who could provide a Comanche-language centered household for children. Ultimately for the Comanche language to survive the negative impacts of the boarding school experience and other innumerable linguistic atrocities, its transmission from parents to children has resume.

Meyers Spring Archaeological Survey

PI: Dr. Brett A. Houk, Assistant Professor
Co-PI: Dr. Tamra Walter, Associate Professor

Project Dates: On-going, 2007 to present.
Project Funding: Private Donation (<$20,000)

Summary: Through a gift from a private individual, Texas Tech archaeologists are conducting an intensive archaeological survey to document the nature and condition of the cultural resources in a 600-acre parcel of land in Terrell County, Texas. The project is being conducted for the Rock Art Foundation, which has an archaeological easement on the tract. The project area is home to two National Register properties: Bullis’ Camp Site and the Meyers Springs Pictograph Site. The former includes the ruins of Fort Meyers, a temporary camp used in the 1870s–1880s by Lieutenant John L. Bullis and Black-Seminole Indian Scouts detached from Ft. Clark. The other National Register property is a rock shelter where, in 1935, Forrest Kirkland recorded a large rock art panorama representing at least three periods of paintings. Texas Tech’s investigations include assessments of the historic component, the rock art site, and previously unrecorded prehistoric features across the project area. The work will lead to two MA thesis as well as multiple presentations, articles, and reports.

Documenting and Describing the Jarai Language: an Endangered Language of Vietnam and North America

PI: Dr. Jeff Williams, Professor of Anthropology
RA: Mr. Lap Siu, MA candidate in Anthropology

Project Dates: On-going
Project Funding: Research Enhancement Fund, TTU, $35,000 (REF funding 1 September 2008 through 31 August 2009)

Summary: Jarai, a Highland Chamic language of the larger Austronesian language family, is endangered both in Vietnam and in the United States. This project seeks to document – through audio and video recordings—and to describe—through the development of a reference grammar and dictionary—the Jarai language as it is spoken in the North Carolina among refugees. There are no existing published materials on North American Jarai. Materials on the Jarai language as it is spoken in Vietnam are very limited and the more recent publications are written in Vietnamese. A video of some of the documentation work is linked here. In this clip an Ede man is playing the đing nam. The đing nam is used in traditional Ede society to accompany the genre of ‘sung poetry’ and may also function as a speech surrogate.

Jarai is linguistically important for a number of reasons. As one of only a handful of Austronesian languages spoken on the mainland of Southeast Asia, it provides insights and clues into larger Austronesian linguistic prehistory and history. Jarai contacts with surrounding ethnolinguistic groups speaking various Tai and Mon-Khmer languages have resulted in the diffusion of grammatical features and lexical items into the language.

The project has resulted in the development of an edited book proposal currently under review by Cambridge University Press entitled Grammatical Aesthetics in the Mainland Southeast Asia Linguistic Area. Scholars from several countries with research expertise on most of the language families of the region will contribute chapters focusing on the intersection of the aesthetic and grammatical components of speech in genres such as poetry, song, and reduplicative forms.

La Milpa Core Project

PI: Dr. Brett A. Houk, Assistant Professor

Project Dates: On-going, 2007 to present.
Project Funding: Cost-sharing field school and TTU Research Enhancement Fund Grant ($100,00–150,000)

Summary: The La Milpa Core Project (LMCP) has been investigating the southern plazas at La Milpa, Belize each summer since 2007. La Milpa is the third largest Maya ruin in Belize and was occupied for nearly 1,500 years. The LMCP has been funded by the cost-sharing Field School in Maya Archaeology each season and by an internal Research Enhancement Fund (REF) grant during the 2009 season. The REF grant was used to investigate Structure 21, the fifth largest pyramid at La Milpa. The LMCP has made significant discoveries relating to the nature of Plaza B at La Milpa, radically altering the previously established architectural history for the site and uncovering important information regarding ritual planning during the Late Classic period (ca. A.D. 600–800). New radiocarbon dates from multiple contexts have shown that La Milpa was occupied for as much as a century longer than previously believed. The research of the LMCP is resulting in several MA theses, an undergraduate honors thesis, and numerous papers, reports, and articles by the PI.

Casilina East Service Area Archaeological Project

Project Consultant: Dr. Robert Paine, Professor

Project Dates: On-going, 2006 to present.
Project Funding: Italian government grant.

Summary: This is contact archaeology project that involves the recovery and paleopathological assessment of the Roman Republic and Imperial Roman period burials from the archaeological site of Aquinum, Italy. The archaeological and paleopathological company working this site is Charun S.r.l. of Rome. The site was discovered as part of a motorway service area (The Casilina East Service Area) construction project in part sponsored by the interest group Autostrade. The Roman town of Aquinum is near the modern city of Casilina, Italy. The burials date from the 2nd century BC to 2nd century AD. During the 2007 field season 125 burials were recorded and examined. The most interesting individual examined so far is a male suffering from leprosy. The paleopathological analysis has been presented at the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in 2008. The 2009 field season uncovered over 250 additional burials; they have yet to be examined. One tomb yielded over 100 burials. The paleopathological assessment of the newly recovered burials will continue in 2009–2010.