Highlights
Student Profile: Adam Menzies
In his junior year at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Adam Menzies attended field school in Belize where he experienced hands-on archeology for the very first time. The cultural anthropology major did not have an archeology background, but he did have an insatiable curiosity and an understanding of the factors that influence the formation of societies. Those two variables made for a powerful combination. That first trip led to four more seasons of research and study of the ancient Maya in Belize, and a master’s degree from Trent University before Menzies applied and was accepted to the University of Pittsburgh’s doctoral program in the Department of Anthropology.
“A lot of the publications I was reading were coming from the graduate students and faculty at Pitt, and I was very impressed with the anthropology department’s success rate for National Science Foundation grants,” remembers Menzies.
During his campus visit, Menzies interviewed with Dick Drennan, Distinguished Professor and member of the National Academy of Sciences, and Mikael Haller, a graduate student in the department. Those conversations, the seminar classes he visited, and the department’s impressive national and international reputation made Menzies’ decision to attend Pitt a straightforward one.
Menzies and Mike Haller ended up becoming collaborators when Menzies began his research examining the control and creation of finished goods and its impact on social hierarchy in the same Panamanian river valley where Haller was also working.
“There is a great ethnohistoric record for Panama and a significant mix of iconographic records and Spanish documents. My research on craft production—axes, pottery—fits into a multi-scale regional analysis that Mike was involved in.”
A two-year fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and a National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement Grant (NSF) helped to support Menzies’ nearly seven months of field research in Panama. In the first five weeks, Menzies, Haller, and a small team of students from Pitt surveyed one site where the society’s elites lived. That initial field work was followed by six weeks in the lab, during which the team washed, cataloged, and analyzed the materials they had collected, before returning to the field for another two months of smaller, more targeted excavations.
The SSHRC funding not only supported Menzies’ own work, but enabled him to extend support from the NSF to the other anthropology students—four graduate and one undergraduate students in all—who were able to travel to Panama and participate in his research.
“It made a big difference,” Menzies says of the SSHRC fellowship. “It’s been one of those instances where the impact has a great ripple effect.”
