Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Debra L. Martin

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Debra L. Martin" at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Professor Martin’s extraordinary achievements in anthropology have crossed interdisciplinary boundaries to unpack the complexity of human experiences through direct archaeological and osteological analyses, theoretical scholarship, exhaustive publications, and her leadership across disciplines and within her teaching and mentoring. Her research has transformed our understanding how violent events are shaped, used, and experienced by people in the past, highlighting how violence impacts the lives of those on the margins. She is a role model in how to perform engaged, ethical, and forward-moving research. This session celebrates the ways her teaching, mentorship and collaborative work has impacted her students and colleagues. The papers presented here reflect on Dr. Martin’s rock-steady mentorship, leadership, and collaboration in the ways we all work to read the past and strive for humanistic and scientific models of inquiry, and consider our own research questions. She has significantly reshaped the field of bioarchaeology, biological anthropology, biocultural studies, and forensic sciences. She shows by example not only how to do good anthropology but how to be a good anthropologist. We take tremendous pleasure in sharing our experiences and scholarship to recognize Dr. Martin in honor of the Fryxell award.

Other Keywords
Bioarchaeology/Skeletal Analysis • Theory • Slavery • Historic • Ancestral Pueblo • Warfare, Violence, and Conflict • Ritual • Colonialism • Archaic • Mogollon

Geographic Keywords
United States of America (Country) • North America (Continent) • USA (Country) • New Mexico (State / Territory) • Oklahoma (State / Territory) • Arizona (State / Territory) • Texas (State / Territory) • Sonora (State / Territory) • Chihuahua (State / Territory) • Colorado (State / Territory)

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-11 of 11)

  • Documents (11)
Documents
  • Beyond the Brutality: Ritualized Violence in the Archaic Period Southeast (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Diana Simpson.

    This is an abstract from the "Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Debra L. Martin" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Archaic period of the southeastern United States is characterized by major environmental and ecological changes that likely stimulated ideological changes visible in the archaeological record. This period also demonstrates widespread direct violence that transcends ecologically based explanations. In particular, the...

  • The Body Poetic: Violence, Body Processing, and Identity Formation in the Past (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Osterholtz.

    This is an abstract from the "Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Debra L. Martin" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Deb Martin’s legacy is one of exposing her students and colleagues to new theoretical models, asking everyone to contextualize bioarchaeological data within robust theoretical frameworks. Through Dr. Martin’s mentorship, I began to think of the body differently. The human body can be viewed as an artifact of cultural...

  • Contextualizing Conflict: Social Theory in the Bioarchaeology of Central Anatolia (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Cheryl Anderson.

    This is an abstract from the "Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Debra L. Martin" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Throughout her career Debra Martin has utilized an innovative, multidisciplinary, and theoretical approach to bioarchaeology. One of her most significant contributions to archaeology has been her pioneering work on violence, utilizing social theory and current methodologies in order to interpret the skeletal evidence. Her...

  • Doing Context-Specific, Anthropological Bioarchaeology: Hard Times from England to the Andes (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Bethany Turner. Molly Zuckerman. Haagen Klaus.

    This is an abstract from the "Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Debra L. Martin" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The concept and approach of "bioarchaeology as anthropology," wherein bioarchaeology is framed as interdisciplinary, hypothesis-driven, biocultural, cross-cultural, and focused on understanding the adaptation and evolution of social systems, was pioneered by George Armelagos and has been progressively strengthened and amplified...

  • A Four-Field View in an Increasingly Myopic World (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Ventura Pérez.

    This is an abstract from the "Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Debra L. Martin" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Our scientific perspectives of the world are bound to moments of clarity. Clarity comes from the realization that the questions worth asking are the ones that illuminate the human experience while understanding positionality and privilege in the exploration of those questions. As an MA student, Dr. Martin encouraged me to...

  • Hidden People in the Past: Honoring the Scholarship of Debra Martin (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Catherine Cameron.

    This is an abstract from the "Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Debra L. Martin" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Because archaeologists use ancient material culture to reconstruct the lives of people in the past, they tend to find those people with the most abundant and well-preserved property. Only the past few generations of archaeologists have looked beyond large settlements and monumental buildings to investigate common people. But...

  • Queer Eye for the Dead Guy: The Influence of Debra Martin on a Bioarchaeological Investigation of Gender beyond the Binary (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Toussaint.

    This is an abstract from the "Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Debra L. Martin" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Any aspect of human social life worth studying, whether in the past or present, is a complex product of history, biology, culture, and agency. Gender is a prime and important example of just such a topic. It requires a high degree of nuance to understand and describe gender constructs in a contemporary society, and studies of...

  • Recovering "Los Antepasados": Bioarchaeology of a Historic Genízaro Community in Colonial New Mexico (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Claira Ralston. Debra Martin. Pamela K. Stone. Ventura Perez.

    This is an abstract from the "Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Debra L. Martin" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Nuestra Señora de Belén Archaeological Project explores a colonial mission church and plaza site dating to the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Belén, New Mexico. The colonial village of Belén was populated by a diverse community of Spanish and mixed-heritage individuals, including a number of Native American...

  • Skeletal Transcripts as Ancestral Voices, a Legacy of Interdisciplinary Work: Recognizing the Contributions of Dr. Debra L. Martin to American Archaeology and Beyond (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Pamela Stone.

    This is an abstract from the "Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Debra L. Martin" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Using the skeleton as a transcript of past experiences is not new, and over the last 40 years more nuanced interpretations, through intersectional, humanistic, scientific models have been developed. In the field of bioarchaeology this works has been impacted by the many exceptional contributions of Dr. Debra Martin. She has...

  • What’s Your Question? Theoretical Bioarchaeology in the American Southwest and Ancient Arabia (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Baustian.

    This is an abstract from the "Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Debra L. Martin" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bioarchaeology today is interdisciplinary, scientific, and theoretical. For over 30 years, Debra Martin has contributed substantially to archaeology by promoting these shifts in the discipline. Her scholarly accomplishments are extensive but I suggest that perhaps her most important contribution to the field of bioarchaeology...

  • Why We Study Violent Behaviors in the Past: Dr. Debra Martin’s Contributions to Research on Systems of Socially Sanctioned Warfare and Systematic Exploitation (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Harrod.

    This is an abstract from the "Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Debra L. Martin" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dr. Debra Martin’s work has enhanced our understanding of how different forms of violent interaction are often culturally sanctioned in society. Her work has revealed the physical and social impact on individuals who sustained violence-related trauma. My scholarship continues her work, and explores the ways human skeletal...