Current Board of Directors

Justin M. Nolan
President
(March 2011–March 2013)

Justin M. Nolan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Arkansas. His research interests include the perpetuation of Western Cherokee knowledge, classification, and use of native flora and fauna of the Ozark Mountain region. As a project coordinator for Cherokee Nation’s cultural conservation programs, Nolan is examining the survivorship of the Cherokee language in rural Northeast Oklahoma through projects designed to safeguard natural resources which constitute the basis for traditional Cherokee foodways, health beliefs, and expressive cultural practices. Since joining the anthropology faculty at UA, Nolan has examined vernacular folklore in the Ouachita Mountains, medicinal plant knowledge in the Missouri Ozarks, historic hunting and fishing technology in North Louisiana, and ethnic-specific foodways in the Arkansas Delta. [Link to detailed biography]

William Balée
President Elect/Vice-President
(March 2011–March 2013)

William Balée is Professor of Anthropology at Tulane University. He has carried out long-term ethnographic fieldwork with several different indigenous societies associated with the Tupí-Guaraní family of languages in Brazil, Bolivia, and Argentina. Most of his work has been with the Ka’apor people of eastern Amazonian Brazil. Themes of Balée’s research include historical ecology, ethnobiology, and Greater Amazonia. He recently collaborated with Brazilian scientists in directing the first forest inventory of a monumental archaeological enclosure, known as a geoglyph, in Acre, of the western Brazilian Amazon. His most current research project involves comparative study of arboriculture in Amazonia and the phytogeographic province known as Malesia.

Cynthia Fowler
Secretary (March 2012–March 2015)

Cynthia Fowler teaches anthropology and public health at Wofford College. She is interested in multispecies interactions between people, plants, and animals at the local level and their links to regional- and global-level phenomena. Her teaching practices combine transmitting scholarly information with advocacy of human rights and ecosystems health. She has participated in interdisciplinary research in ethnobiology, ecosystems health, and medical anthropology, in Southeast Asia, Oceania, the U.S. South, and Brazil. Her current focus is on the critical study of fire science and the use of fire to manage landscapes. Cultural identity and natural resource management in Kodi (Sumba, Indonesia) was the focus of her doctoral research and continues to capture most of her attention. [Link to more information about Cissy]

Steve Wolverton
Treasurer (March 2011–March 2014)

Steve is an environmental scientist and archaeologist specializing in paleozoology of North America during the Holocene. He is assistant professor in environmental archaeology and conservation paleozoology at the University of North Texas, Department of Geography. His interests span ecology, paleoecology of North America, environmental archaeology, paleozoology, and conservation biology. His recent research focuses on white-tailed deer and black bear biology and the use of datasets from zooarchaeology and paleontology to address modern issues in conservation biology. In addition, Steve has interests in analytical chemistry and has on-going research in artifact residue analysis including fatty-acid and protein residues from pottery. [Link to detailed biography]

Marsha Quinlan
Board Member - Promotion, Outreach and Inreach Coordinator: Intra- and Inter-Community Promotion (March 2010–March 2013)

Marsha Quinlan is a sociocultural anthropologist who works largely at the intersection of medical anthropology and ethnobotany. She is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Washington State University in Pullman, WA. Her fieldwork has been in North and South America and the Caribbean, with most of her research on the medicine of a largely-horticulturalist community in Dominica. She recently began working with Lummi in Washington's Puget Sound on USDA-funded research on ways to incorporate plants from their traditional diet (and appropriate substitutes) as an anti-diabetic strategy.

Kimberlee Chambers
Board Member - Promotion, Outreach Coordinator: Position 2. Fund raising and Promotion (March 2012–March 2015)

Kimberlee Chambers (MSc., University of Victoria 2001; Ph.D., University of California, Davis 2006) is an Assistant Professor at Willamette University, a liberal arts school in Salem, Oregon where she is cross-posted between Environmental/Earth Sciences and Latin American Studies. Currently her research focuses on harvesting and commercialization of a native wild chile peppers (chiltepins) in Northern Mexico and the ‘locavore’ movement in the Willamette Valley, Oregon. Her ethnoecological research bridges disciplines and communities. She has applied her interests in human-environment interactions to research and teaching topics that include agriculture origins and dispersals, Indigenous People’s traditional ecological knowledge, traditional land and resource management, local food systems, sustainable development, ecological restoration, and the conservation of biological and cultural diversity. To date, her regions of focus have composed a continuum of landscapes encompassing experiences and interests in British Columbia, Oregon, California, and central and Sonoran Mexico. [Link to more information about Kimberlee]

T. Abe Lloyd 
Board Member - Promotion, Outreach and Inreach Coordinator. Position 3. Student Outreach (March 2010-March 2013)

Abe is a graduate student in ethnoecology at the Univeristy of Victoria in Victoria, BC. His academic interest is in traditional systems of land and resource management. He is currently writing his M.Sc. thesis on the historic practice of  cultivating the edible roots of Pacific silverweed (Argentina egedii) by the Kwakwaka'wakw of northern Vancouver Island and the adjacent mainland coast of British Columbia. Abe is exploring how traditional management may have enhanced the productivity and palability of silverweed roots by conducting qualitative interviews and quantitative field and lab experiments. After completing his masters degree, Abe intends to continue studying food producing ecosystems that were hisotrically managed by the First People of coastal British Columbia. His career goals are to conduct research that will help revitalize fading food traditions and to explore the sustainabile potential of wild foods in a modern diet. While Abe's childhood and graduate research have been spent in NW North America, he has lived many places throughout the US and has done ethnobotanical work internationally in Nepal and Tibet with the Peace Corps (2003-04) and the Missouri Botanical Garden (2009). He is a passionate forager of wild edible plants, mushrooms, and animals and tries to regularly incorporate them into his diet.
 

Kris Gremillion
Board Member – Web Liaison (March 2011–March 2014)

Kris Gremillion is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the Ohio State University. Her book Ancestral Appetites:Food in Prehistory was recently published by Cambridge University Press. Kris’ research interests include paleoethnobotany, the origins of food production in eastern North America, evolutionary theory in archaeology, and dietary consequences of culture contact in the New World. She has published widely on these topics in journals including American Antiquity, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, and Journal of Archaeological Science and is a frequent contributor to edited volumes on agricultural origins and paleoethnobotany. Her field and laboratory research has focused on the rise of indigenous farming systems in eastern Kentucky and its relationship to land use and anthropogenic environmental change. She continues studying archaeobotanical collections from eastern Kentucky for insight into prehistoric cultivation systems and broader processes of plant domestication. Recently she has become involved in collaborative research into the domestication of seed dormancy in Chenopodium and the role of phenotypic plasticity in plant domestication. Kris also serves as consulting archaeobotanist on a project headed by Shannon Dawdy of the University of Chicago that is investigating the process of creolization in early colonial New Orleans.

Peter Stahl
Board Member - Journal of Ethnobiology & Board Liaison (March 2011–March 2014)

Peter Stahl is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Victoria. He is an archaeologist with a particular geographical emphasis on neotropical lowland areas and research interests in historical ecology, tropical forest ecology, zooarchaeology, vertebrate taphonomy, and Amazonian ethnology. Most of his research takes place in Ecuador where he is currently finishing a collaborative research effort on the Early Holocene zooarchaeology of Las Vegas assemblages in southwestern Ecuador.