BLOOMSBURG UNIVERSITY
Bloomsburg
Pennsylvania
ANTHROPOLOGY NEWSLETTER
Nov-Dec 1993
Vol. 18, No. 3

Meet Our New Faculty Member: Joining the Department of Anthropology for the
Spring 1994 semester will be Dr. Premalata Ghimire, currently of Cabrini College in
Philadelphia. Dr. Ghimire, who is from Nepal, holds both a M.A. and a Ph.D. in
anthropology from Bryn Mawr College. Dr. Ghimire's research has focused on
problems of caste in southern Nepal, particularly among a group of people known as
the Satar. A former hunting & gathering culture, the Satar have adopted agriculture in
this century, and many Satar have adopted caste customs relating to purity and
pollution in order to improve their position in Nepalese society. Dr. Ghimire will be
replacing Dr. Minderhout, who is on sabbatical for the Spring semester.
During the Spring semester Dr. Ghimire will be teaching two sections of cultural
anthropology (46.200) plus the new field methods in cultural anthropology course
(46.475). In addition, she will be offering a course on the peoples and cultures of
South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, etc.). Anthropology students are
urged to avail themselves of this opportunity.

Marriage in Japan: On June 9, 1993, Crown Prince Naruhito of Japan, destined to
be the 126th Emperor of Japan1 married Masako Owada, a diplomat in Japan's Foreign
Ministry, in a ceremony carefully watched in Japan and publicized around the world.
The wedding spawned a host of articles in the American media about the couple, most
of which focused on the arranged aspects of the marriage. Americans are both
fasc1nated and horrified by arranged marriages. With our value of rugged
individualism held above us as a banner, we extol the virtues of a marital union based
on romance and the personal commitment of two individuals to a life together - and
apart from others. Arranged marriages were something forced on our greatgrandparents in their country of origin before coming to the United States; we like to
think of the arranged marriage as an extinct anachronism, despite the fact that they are
still very common the world over. Thus, the Crown Prince's wedding held a special
fascination for Americans. How could this young, affluent, college-educated couple
enter into something so out of touch with the present day?
In fact, the Japanese royal wedding was a result of an interesting mix of personal
choice and carefully arranged circumstances. The couple met for the first time seven
years ago at a reception given in Tokyo to honor Princess Elena of Spain, in town to
open a show honoring the Spanish artist, Goya. The Crown Prince had been putting
the finishing touches on his master's degree in history, but was persuaded to attend,
mostly to hear- a Japanese string quartet play Mozart, the Prince's favorite. Masako
was in attendance as the guest of her father, the Director-General of the Treaty
Division of the Foreign Ministry. An acquantaince of the Prince's from university days
introduced the couple. The Prince was immediately smitten; she was not. Masako

had just passed the entrance exam for the Foreign Ministry, a grueling test which only
a few pass. She was about to become one of the 800 civil servants who run Japanese
policy making. She had set her sights on that career and was not about to be
sidetracked by marriage.
Numerous meetings between the two followed at the Prince's insistence. Each was
carefully arranged and chaperoned. Eventually, he proposed - and she declined. Her
career came first, she said, and for five years the couple did not communicate with
each other. Meanwhile, the Imperial Household Agency formed a princess-search
group to find a suitable match for the Prince. They carefully researched suitable young
women and presented them, o~e-by-one, to the Prince - who rejected them all. By the
summer of 1992, he issued the search t~·nup a warning: either find a second Masako
Owada, or he would stay single, whatevl,i" dyiastic complications er ,sued. Masako,
meanwhile, was moving up in the foreign ministry. Her career was approaching her
first overseas posting as an ambassador, and it was widely agreed in Japan, that
should that happen, she, too, would remain single. Japan has only one female
ambassador (to Finland), and she is married to the Japanese ambassador to Nigeria.
The deadlock was broken by senior officials in the Imperial Household Agency and
the Foreign Ministry who appealed to Masako's father to persuade his daughter to
hear the Prince out another time. Her father agreed and talked his daughter into
another meeting with the Prince last October. Again the Prince proposed, and again,
Masako refused. But the Prince pressed his suit, meeting (chaperoned, of course) a
dozen times with Masako in November and December 1992. Finally, she rel~nted,
with what is probably one of the most romantic statements of modern history: "I shall do
my best to be of service to your Highness." And not without misgivings, she later told a
television interviewer, but it was her duty, she decided, to her family and to Japan.
Of course, this seems like a special case. Royalty is different after all. But the
"romance" between the Crown Prince and Masako Owada is very familiar to the
Japanese, about half of whom have .Q!!llfil , or arranged marriages (actually, .Q!!llfil
translates as "honorable seeing-meetings"). In the past, marriages were arranged
between two families who generally lived in widely separated areas. Arrangements
were facilitated by professional go-betweens who introduced the families to each
other. The couple to be married had little or no say in the proceedings and often did
not meet each other until the wedding ceremony.
In modern Japan, the circumstances of an arranged marriage are somewhat
different. Today, unmarried persons in their early twenties seek help from one of over
500 agencies that promise only the best social contacts. A prospective bride or groom
goes through a lengthy interview at the agency and has his/her picture taken . The
ag~ncy then seeks out appropriate singles of the opposite sex. If someone is
interested, the agency arranges a meeting in a public place, such as a restaurant. In
attendance are the young woman and man, both sets of parents, and a representative
of the agency. At these meetings, generally only the parents and the agent speak;
each set of parents presents the credentials - education, occupation, income, hobbies

- of its child. Then the meeting breaks up. In the week following the meeting, the
young people,decide if another meeting is desirable; if not, the agency tries again. If a
second meeting is desired, it involves generally only the man and woman, but is often
a stilted, formal affair in which each finds it hard to know what to talk about. If no
common ground is established, the relationship ends there. But if there is some
common interest, and the two warm to each other, the relationship grows. If there are
three or four dates, everyone assumes that the two will marry. If that likelihood grows,
it becomes the responsibility of the go-between agency to thoroughly research both
young people and their families to root out family scandals or unacceptable kin lines.
There is,for example, a hereditary Japanese untouchable caste generally today called
the burakumin ("village people"), but who used to be called .em ("filth"). No one seems
to know how the burakumi got their low caste status, but it is agreed that no decent
person wants to marry one. Since the burakumin are physically indistinguishable from
other Japanese, research is necessary to turn up undesirables in a prospective bride's
or groom's background.
Of course, it is possible to have a love match in Japan: the Japanese phrase for
one, renai kekkon, roughly translates as "make your own headache." But many
Japanese find it hard to meet and mingle with the opposite sex all by themselves.
Many Japanese schools are sex-segregated. Teenagers travel in all-male or allfemale packs. High school is such serious business in Japan - 8 hours of classes, 5
hours of study in the ·evenings, plus special test preparatory schools called luku. - that
high school age people have little opportunity to date. Even college life is built around
activities that segregate the sexes. And unmarried women are expected to live at
home with their parents and conform to strict rules, such as early evening curfews,
imposed by them. As a result, many. young Japanese are extremely uncomfortable
talking to someone of the opposite sex. And besides, an arranged marriage is more
proper, an important consideration in a country where one's tatemae ("front" or public
presentation) is far more important than one's honne ("back" or what one truly feels).
And, the Japanese, go-betweens are able to find truly compatible persons, people
with common interests on which a modern marriage may be built. The Crown Prince
and Masako Owada are an example. Both love classical music and outdoor sports.
His passion is history; she is an economist immersed in international affairs - history in
the making. He went to Oxford for his degree; she was just about to go there as final
prepping for her foreign service posting (her degree is from Harvard). She likes
horses; his·family owns a twenty-horse stud farm. She likes g~, Japanese steamed
dumplings; he loves them . They both relish Chinese-style spiced bean curd. And so
on. Japanese commentators like to point out how much better suited the new royal
couple is for each other than Great Britain's Charles and Diana, whose separation was
announced last December at about the same time that the Prince and Masako's
engagement was proclaimed. Charles, at the time of that marriage, was a 32 year old
ex-fighter pilot whose passions were grouse shooting, architecture and the
environment. His bride was 20 and a former nanny and kindergarten teacher who was
interested in clothes, swimming, and pop music. No Japanese matchmaker was
surprised to read, less than 18 months after Charles and Diana's wedding that the

couple was desperately unhappy. And no Japanese matchmaker anticipates a similar
fate for the new Japanese royal couple.
For more information on Japanese marriage, we would recommend Pink Samurai:
Core Marriage and Sex in Contemporary Japan by Nicholas Bornoff (Pocket Press,
1991.)

Anthropological Ethics Thwart Native American Land Claim: by Tom Aleta.
The ethics of conducting anthropological research have changed considerably over
the past century as the discipline of anthropology has developed and matured. The
early ethnographers, exemplifit::cf by Franz Boas, Bronislaw Malinowski, Alfred
Kroeber, and Margaret Mead, saw them ~~Ives as dispassionate scientists whose job
was to accurately study and describe a L.ul!ure without affecting or altering the people
or their way of iife in any way. As late as the 1960's, a respected anthropologist like
Colin Turnbull could observe and record the starvation and disintegration among the
lk of Uganda without offering food or organizing a relief effort for fear of distorting the
cultural process he was witnessing. In my Principles of Cultural Anthropology courses
I liken this approach to the admonition seen in many wildlife parks today, or to the
"Prime Directive" of the Star Trek series which prohibited Captain Kirk and the crew of
the Enterprise from interfering with or modifying the cultures they contacted.
Anyone who has ever watched Star Trek, or who has given serious thought to
studying a social or cultural group, knows that it is impossible to adhere to the Prime
Directive. The mere presence of an outside observer necessaril;y alters the behavior
of those being studied. Furthermore, the social relations that an anthropologist
establishes in order to acquire living accomodations, to secure food, to have the
laundry done, to create a social network, to gather the desired anthropological data,
etc., fundamentally alter the social and cultural dynamics of the group under study. In
light of this reality, modern field anthropologists subscribe to a far different ethic than
their forebearers. Since their presence unavoidably alters the culture, field workers
accept a responsibility to do nothing intentionally to harm cultures and to act i_n
cultures' best interests, especially when it is threatened by a more powerful social,
economic, or political force. Hence, it is not uncommon to see anthropologists like
Terrence Turner lobby for Bororo sovereignty before the Brazilian legislature or
Napoleon Chagnon raise funds to defend the Yanomamo lands against encroachment
by settlers.
This form of advocacy has become so central to modern anthropological inquiry that
it is encoded in the American Anthropological Association's Principles of Professional
Responsibility (PPR): "In research, an anthropologist's paramount responsibility is to
those he studies. When there is a conflict of ·interest, these individuals must come first.
The anthropologist must do everything within his power to protect their physical, social,
and psychological welfare and to honor their dignity and privacy." Considering the
good intentions upon which this principle is based, it is ironic that it recently worked to
the detriment of Native Americans involved in a land dispute with the Canadian
government.

Black Mountain and the Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute: by Tom Aleto.
Attempts to recover lands lost since the arrival of Europeans is at the heart of much
recent Native American political activity. As the preceding article indicates, these land
disputes frequently pit Native American cultures against state, provincial, and federal
governments which are accused of illegally possessing ancestral aboriginal territories.
A number of these disputes are complicated by the competing claims of different
Native American groups, each of which asserts to be the rightful owner of the. land
under consideration. Such is the situation in the battle over the boundaries of the
Navajo and Hopi reservations, perhaps the most famous and contentious Native
American land dispute of this century. The most recent skirmish in this long simmering
feud centers on the Big Mountain area of Black Mesa in northeastern Arizona, an area
rich in coal, uranium, and other mineral deposits.
This dispute has generated a great deal of interest among non-Indians who have
formed public.. interest groups to lobby for the Native Americans before the federal
government. But in a dispute that pits one Native American group against another,
which native interests are being supported by lobbying activities? How can general
"Native American" interests be served when the success of the Navajo is a defeat for
the Hopi and vice versa? A review of some of the propaganda literature produced by
the two tribes illustrates the complexity of the issue and the difficulty of defining "native 11
rights in an abstract sense.
The most powerful public-interest group involved in this matter is the Big Mountain
Support Group (BMSG) of Oakland, California, an organization with regional offices
throughout the United States, including Philadelphia. The BMSG literature takes a
decidedly pro-Navajo stance in the dispute and represents the conflict as one which
pits the powerful Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and energy conglomerates against the
powerless and vulnerable Navajo and Hopi. In a series of press releases and public
service announcements with titles like "Big Mountain Fact Sheet," "Peabody Coal and
Big Mountain: Mineral Exploitation on Sacred Land" and "Big Mountain: Spirit,
Resistance, Support," the BMSG presents the dispute as an attempt to dislocate the
Navajo and Hopi from a territory known as the Joint Use Area (JUA) for the purposes
of depriving both tribes of their rightful ownership of the rich mineral deposits located
throughout the zone. It portrays the Navajo and Hopi as mutually aggrieved parties
who have a common interest in protecting their ownership of the economically
valuable and spiritually sacred JUA, a territory set aside for their joint use in 1882.
Even though the BMSG presents itself as a voice for both the Navajo and the Hopi,
a strong Navajo bias is clear in all of its literature. It repeatedly refers to the disputed
territory as the "ancestral" territory of the Navajo to whom Big Mountain and the JUA
are "sacred" and "holy". It uses the term "Dineh, 11 a Navajo term that means "the
people" to refer to the aggrieved parties: "Dineh" is a foreign word to the Hopi who
would never use it as a term of self-reference. The literature refers to the peaceful
relations between the Navajo and Hopi and minimizes the depth and intensity of the
historical animosity between them: "For generations members of the two tribes have

coexisted peacefully on the JUA. Occasionally there was strife, but the clashes have
been between families and they were settled by the families." The BMSG blames the
government and Peabody Coal for driving "a wedge between the Navajo and the
Hopi, who once lived in friendly interdependence on overlapping ancestral Lands."
Of particular con·cern to the Navajo is a 1974 law that requires them to vacate most
of the JUA and to reduce their animal herds by 90%. The BMSG interprets this law as
the first step in the government's plan to eventually remove all of the Native Americans
from the JUA and make the land available to non-Indian mining interests. The Navajo
accuse the BIA of attempting to starve them off the land by confiscating the animals on
the basis of invalid and ethnocentric scientific studies. "While the BIA describes the
confiscation in terms of 'grazing regulation,' 'carrying capacity,' and 'range
improvement,' the fact is that these are crude sciences at best and represent the
imposition of European-based scientific values on a traditional people in total
desecration of the spiritual and physical relationship to Mother Earth." The implication
is that people with a native, non-European world view would not see evidence of overgrazing or overutilization of the area.
The BMSG advocacy of the Navajo is evident also in its assessment of the Hopi
Tribal Council, which frequently sides with the BIA against the Navajo on land-related
issues. The BMSG portrays the current Hopi Tribal Council as an illegitimate authority
whose structure is foreign to traditional Hopi culture and therefore not a rightful
representative of the Hopi people. The following passage clearly states this position:
"In 1934, the U.S. Congress enacted the Indian Reorganization Act, mandating that
Indian Nations adopt an elective Tribal Council that would supercede traditional forms
of government. An election - a process tally foreign to the traditional Hopi - was held to
determine whether they would thereafter be subject to a central, U.S.-style legislative
and executive body. Virtually all of the several thousand traditional Hopi refused to
vote, thereby 'losing' the election to the small minority of 'progressives' who did vote.
A European-based system emerged with which energy companies and the U.S.
government could deal." In contrast, the BMSG claims, "The traditional Navajo
leadership rejected the councils in favor of their own clan-based decision making
process." The intended message is clear: the Navajo have maintained their tradition ·
and integrity by standing their ground against outside pressure, while tile Hopi have
been coopted and manipulated by non-lndiar ,.
The Hopi have a far different story to tell about the land dispute and their
relationship with the Navajo. In literature published by the Hopi Tribe Office of Public
Relations and distributed to visitors to the reservation, the Hopi present themselves as
the only true aboriginal people of the area and the sole legitimate owners of the
disputed territory. The first paragraph of a document entitled "Hopi: The Story of Our
People" reads 'We Hopi are an ancient people. Here in Arizona we trace our history
back two millenium (sic). We believe that we emerged here over a 100 generations
ago. We are one of the oldest cultures in North America. Hopi and our ancestors lived
in these arid lands long before the coming of the Paiutes, Navajos, Apaches, Spanish
and the Americans. 11 In addition, it claims "Hopi clan markings and ruins of ancestral

In the case known as Delgamuukw et.al. v. the Queen, the chiefs of the Gitksan and
the Wet'suwet'en people petitioned the government of British Columbia for ownership
and jurisdiction over the 22,000 square mile territory they claimed as their traditional
homeland. They argued that because their ancestors never ceded the land in a treaty,
they had never given up rights to its use and control, rights which were traditionally
held by the head chiefs of their matrilineages. In support of their position, the chiefs
called a number of anthropologists who had studied their cultures intensively. The
anthropologists testified that oral tradition made it clear that the land in dispute had
been part of the Gitskan and Wet'suwet'en ancestral territory before the arrival of
Europeans and that the matrilineages had acted as the legitimate authority of the
people in administering the land.
In support of its case, the government of British Columbia offered the view of a
cultural geographer who, based on a review of archival sources, testified that prior to
the arrival of the European fur trade the Gitskan and the Wet'suwet'en had neither
used their land enough to constitute aboriginal rights or mark its precise boundaries.
Based on this, and other testimony, the judge ruled that the Gitskan and
Wet'suwet'en's land claim was illegitimate because they had lived in a state of
primitivity until the British established political control and they did not meet the legal
requirements for aboriginal sovereignty. In his 394 page report, the judge made it
clear that he considered the claims of ownership delineated in the oral tradition as
hearsay and rejected the testimony of anthropologists as invalid. With respect to the
latter, he cited the PPR as evidence that the anthropologists were not objective,
disinterested scholars, but rather advocates with a professional responsibility to
defend the rights of their informants. He clearly implied that the anthropologists, in
order to fulfill their ethical responsibility, may have misrepresented the facts
intentionally. At the same time, the judge found the testimony of the cultural
geographer to be dispassionate, objective, and credible, at least partially because he
was not bound to any similar statement of ethical principals.
In a recent article in the American Anthropological Association's ANTHROPOLOGY
NEWSLETTER, two of the anthropologists involved in the proceedings - Richard Daly
and Antonia Mills of the University of Virginia - point to the irony of the case and
suggest that the ethical principals have set a standard which anthropologists cannot
meet. They write: "As students of anthropology we are taught to pursue our research
with the dispassionate objectivity of natural scientists; yet our actions are constrained
by ethical codes necessitated by the 'unnatural' (human) nature of our subject matter.
We are simultaneously expected to be of this world and above it. The ensuing
contradiction is an occupational hazard we confront on a daily basis." They arge that
as long as the principles outlined in the PPR are presented as moral. imperatives,
rather than as the legitimate result of scientific research, the efforts of anthropologists
to defend the rights of the people they study will be open to the kind of suspicion
expressed by the Canadian judge. As a result, the PPR may continue to have the
unintended result of harming the very people anthropologists seek to help.

villages clearly mark the traditional boundaries of our homeland." They believe that
those boundaries include not only the area of the Big Mountain-JUA land dispute, but
all of the land set aside in 1882 for the Navajo reservation.
Not only do they view the Navajo as unwanted interlopers, but their portrayal of
intertribal relations are substantially different from those of the BMSG. "Meanwhile,
during the Spanish rule, depredations by Navajo raiders also began, who, with the
horses introduced by Europeans, had become the chief enemy of the Hopis. With
Mexican rule beginng in the early 19th century, Navajos began to drift into Hopi
territory, leading to raiding parties in Hopi fields and kidnapping of women and
children." Concerning what thP BMSG documents refer to as "friendly
interdependence on overlapping ancesh ,I Lands" in the JUA in more recent times, the
Hopi literature contends "The Navajos ... te-fuc;ed to allow any Hopi use of the Joint
Use Area despiie years of fruitless negotiation." The Hopi accept implicitly the same
BIA data on overutilization of the land which Navajo reject as unscientific and out of
touch with a native world view: "The unrestricted grazing of cattle on the Joint Use
' Area was 800% overgrazed."
The Hopi do not share the BMSG's view that the forced relocation of the Navajo
from the JUA is a ploy by outsiders to steal Indian land. Rather, they see it as a victory
for themselves over the more numerous and land-rich Navajo. In making reference to
the Navajo's "West Virginia-sized reservation" and their own limited territory, the Hopi
reiterate their historical claim to land recovered in the JUA: "The Hopi now have
regained a tiny fraction of the aboriginal lands marked by the ancient shrines to which
the Hopi elders still make pilgrimages each year." Their ultimate hope is to gain title to
all of the territory they held before 1882.
Both the Navajo and the Hopi have vested interests in presenting a portrait of the
dispute to the public which favors their position over that of their adversary. The Hopi
have chosen to make the Navajo the enemy, while the Navajo have chosen to frame
the debate as a conflict between a governmental-business alliance and native
peoples in general. It is clear that the question of "aboriginal rights" cannot be
understood in the context of the simplistic "good native people/bad white people"
scenario presented by groups like the BMSG. Native Americans do not represent a
homogeneous, monolithic group with a single set of convergent interests. Often their
interests and their claims of native ri·ghts diverge dramatically. Considering the
complexity of the matter and the nature of the conflicting interests, it seems that this
land dispute, already over 100 years old, may remain unresolved for a very long time.

British Culture: Americans often believe that the British are just like us - perhaps a
quainter version, all sounding somewhat like Alistair Cooke, but basically the same
culture. However, there are a great many cultural differences between the United
States and Great Britain. For example, an American can expect the British to be more
private and less open about themselves than Americans are. The popular American
opening line "And what do you do?" is considered too personal a question in Great
Britain. The British treasure their privacy and go to great lengths to maintain theirs -

,,,..

and the privacy of others. The British avoid using the telephone, for instance, because
they might interrupt someone else's privacy. Similarly, a British businessperson will
prefer meeting in person, rather than talking something over on the phone. When
Americans want privacy, we go to an enclosed space~ a room or office - and close the
door. To achieve privacy, the British become quiet and give off a series of non-verbal
cues which alert others that they wish to be left alone. Thus, the British can share
space - roommates in an apartment or executives in an office area - with greater ease
than Americans can and not feel that their privacy ·is being invaded.
To the British, status is a matter of who one is, not what one has accomplished in
life. Rank and social class membership are conferred at birth and seldom change
through life. The rare working class Briton who attends an university and becomes a
successful executive will always be a working class person to his/her peers. And, by
comparison, a lord is always a lord, no matter what his financial circumstances might
have become. Similarly, living or working near someone in Great Britain confers no
privilege. For instance, living next doors to a family in Great Britain does not entitle
you to visit them, borrow from or socialize with them, or your children to play with
theirs, especially if you are from different social classes. If the Briton next doors does
talk to you, he/she will stand farther away than you will be comfortable with; the Briton
will also maintain constant eye contact while the conversation is going on. And Britons
will not nod, say "un-huh" or do many of the things an American is used to in indicating
t_
hat they are paying attention to what is being said; instead, they wm blink their eyes in
a culturally accepted manner, which, of course, an American doesn't understand.
Especially surprising to Americans are the many differences between American and
British English. Not only do Americans and Britons have different words for the same
idea, but also there are often entirely different meanings given to the same word or
phrase. For example, in American English, the phrase "to table" means to pull
something out of consideration. But in British English, "to table" means to bring
something up for consideration. Also, the phrase "knocked up" in British English
means to be tired, especially to work at something .tiring. Many an American has been
surprised to hear a Briton say "Let's go get knocked up!" Here is a list of words that are
different in American and British English:
BRITISH ENGLISH

AMERICAN ENGLISH

arterial road
booking clerk
car park
clothespeg
compare
cornet (of ice cream)
a crisp
a chip
friendly society
hire purchase system

main road
ticket agent
parking lot
clothespin
master of ceremonies
ice cream cone
potato chip
trench fry
fraternal organization
installment plan

holiday maker
hooter
rubber
larder
left-luggage office
mobile police
pram
pants
trousers
public prosecutor
raider
running expense

on vacation
horn or siren
eraser
pantry
checkroom
highway patrolman
baby carriage
underwear
pants
district attorney
holdup man or mugger
"'1erating ?"'Pense

For more information on British English, please see English/English by Norman
Schur (1990, Verbatim Books). And by the way, don't call an English person a "Brit";
they find that phrasing offensive.

Anthropology Faculty News: Dr. Tom Aleto presented a paper at the Twelfth
Annual Northeastern Conference on Andean Archaeology & Ethnohistory in Pittsburgh
on October 23, 1993. The paper summarized Dr. Aleto's research at the Ceibo
Grande site on La Puna Island in Ecuador. Dr. Aleto argued his belief, based on
excavation and a reading of historical accounts, that the site was an important
community at the time of contact with the Spanish; he also reported a radiocarbon date
that placed the site in the mid-16th century. Dr. Aleto also attended the prestigious
Dumbarton Oaks conference on Mesoamerican archaeology in Washington, D.C. on
October 9 and 10. Dr. Aleto was accompanied to both conferences by Karen Elwell.
Dr. Dee Anne Wymer presented a paper in the plenary session of a conference
entitled "A View From the Core", which summarized and synthesized research on Ohio
Hopewell Archaeology. Dr. Wymer's paper, "The Ohio Hopewell Econiche: HumanLand Interaction in the Core Area, 11 summarized her work over the last ten years on the
use of plants by the Hopewell. The conference was held in Chillicothe, Ohio.
Dr. Dave Minderhout attended the annual meetings of the American
Anthropological Association, held November 17-21 in Washington, D.C.

FYI: Dr. Minderhout will be on sabbatical during the spring semester of 1994. He will
be writing sample chapters for a proposed introductory textbook for cultural
anthropology. While he will be traveling off and on during the spring semester, he will
also be available to students by appointment during that time. Students wishing to
meet with Dr. Minderhout should call him at his home phone: 784-0905.