When Bones Talk: Bioarchaeology And The African Diaspora

Chestertown, MD, October 8, 2002 — The Washington College Department of Sociology and Anthropology, the Anthropology Club, the Black Student Alliance, the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, and the Gamma Chapter of Maryland of Lambda Alpha present BIOARCHAEOLOGY AND THE AFRICAN DIASPORA, a lecture by Michael L. Blakey, National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of Anthropology at the College of William and Mary. This free talk will be held Thursday, October 17, 2002, at 7:30 p.m. in the Casey Academic Center Forum. The public is invited to attend.
With a crossdisciplinary background in human anatomy and anthropology, Dr. Blakey will discuss how archaeology works with such disciplines to discover how humans lived in the past and were affected by their living conditions. An Adjunct Professor in Anatomy at Howard University College of Medicine where he had for many years been Curator of the W. Montague Cobb Human Skeletal Collection, Dr. Blakey currently directs the New York African Burial Ground Project involving interdisciplinary study of 400 skeletons of Africans enslaved in 18th century New York City. In addition to his field work, he has taught at Spelman College, the University of Rome, Columbia University, and Brown University, and has served as a Research Associate in Physical Anthropology in the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. He is a past President of the Association of Black Anthropologists, a member of the Executive Council of the Society for Medical Anthropology, United States Representative to the Council of the Fourth World Archaeological Congress in Cape Town, and Permanent Representative to Washington for the African Bureau of Education Sciences in Kinshasa and Geneva. Dr. Blakey earned his B.A. at Howard University and the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.