Faculty and Staff

Dr. Joseph F. Foster’s major focus and most of his research has been in the area of Linguistic Typology. Originating from the anthropological tradition of cross-cultural and cross-linguistic comparative analysis, modern Linguistic Typology includes the study of such issues as:
-how widely languages can differ.
-what one can predict about a language from knowing other things about it, and why.
-what kinds of relationships, if any, exist between types of grammatical rules or constraints on the one hand and variation in extralinguistic facets of culture on the other.

More particularly, Dr. Foster’s work has involved the study of case systems, ergativity, accusativity, transitivity, and possession, and the grammatical encoding of culturally significant relations. He is currently attempting a cross-cultural study of vocativity as a grammaticalization of relations in discourse. His linguistic typological and cultural interests coincide in the study of Language Area (Sprachbund) phenomena particularly in N Eurasia and in the Balkans of SE Europe as areas where similar characteristics are shared among unrelated or not closely related languages.

Dr. Foster has also a general interest in the material and social bases for symbol systems, and has investigated in this vein such topics as music accompaniment styles, religious belief and social organization, and the astronomy and calendric lore of the preEuropean North American Plains. Dr. Foster is a member of the Ask a Linguist Panel and a frequent contributor of published reports on its site at http://linguistlist.org/~ask-ling

From 1983 to 2000, Dr. Barry L. Isaac served as editor of Research in Economic Anthropology, a series that published both an annual volume (a mixture of ethnology and archaeology) and occasional supplements (thematic volumes devoted to archaeology). Throughout his editorial tenure, Dr. Isaac’s goals were, first, to further the development of economic anthropology as a subdiscipline of anthropology in the fullest (cross-cultural and cross-temporal) sense and, second, to encourage the equal participation of ethnologists (sociocultural anthropologists) and archaeologists in economic anthropology, which in the past had been identified almost exclusively with ethnology. His current research concerns Aztec ethnohistory, especially political and economic processes, and present-day social stratification in Central Mexico.

Vernon L. Scarborough is a Distinguished University Research Professor and a Charles Phelps Taft Professor in Anthropology at the University of Cincinnati.  His topical interests remain settlement, land use, and water management in the context of the archaic state.  By examining ancient engineered water systems and landscapes, he addresses societal sustainability issues from a comparative ecological perspective. To achieve this end, he has emphasized cross-disciplinary exchange and international fieldwork. He has taught and conducted fieldwork at the University of Khartoum, Sudan (postdoctoral exchange with Southern Methodist University—1981-82), the University of Peshawar, Pakistan (Fulbright Fellowship 1986), and the University of Texas at El Paso (1982-1986). In addition to ongoing land use and water management studies in Belize and Guatemala, he has worked in the Argolid, Greece (1994) and Bali, Indonesia (1998). He has been directly funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation (Balinese support) in addition to several grants from the Taft Foundation Fund and the University of Cincinnati. He received a Weatherhead Fellowship (1995-95) and two Summer Resident Scholarships (1996, 2000) from the School of American Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In 2004, he was awarded the All-University Faculty Rieveschl Award for Creative and Scholarly Works from the University of Cincinnati. Most recently he received a Taft Center Fellowship for the academic year 2006-07. He has published 7 books and over 70 book chapters and journal articles. He is currently editing the volume Water and Humanity: A Historical Overview for UNESCO, a major initiative of their International Hydrological Program (Delft). He is also a member of the Scientific Steering Committee with IHOPE (Integrated History for the Future of the People of Earth—an effort of the IGBP—International Geosphere and Biosphere Programme and the Stockholm Resilience Center) for both the global (Berlin meeting) and the regional Asia (Akita, Japan) and Americas (Santa Fe) initiatives. Since 1992, he has been co-director of the Programme for Belize Archaeological Project, a large, annually active, research project in northwestern Belize. For more information on Programme for Belize follow link: http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/%7Emarl/pfbap.htm

Dr. Alan P. Sullivan is a North American archaeologist whose research focuses on the development of an independent archaeological theory. Drawing on several decades of field experience in the American Southwest, he is exploring how inferences regarding the cultural past can be advanced without dependence on analogs from cultural anthropology. With survey and excavation data from his long-term project in the Upper Basin, which is located just south of Grand Canyon National Park in northern Arizona, Dr. Sullivan is investigating how the dynamic interplay among environmental manipulation, intensive wild-plant production, and unintensive horticulture affects the distribution of perennial settlements and the abandonment patterns of landscapes. He is interested, as well, in applications of high-resolution satellite remote-sensing in heritage-resource research and management.