Faculty & Staff
Faculty Spotlight
Mark Schurr Recipient of the 2008 Rodney F. Ganey, Ph.D., Community-Based Research Award
Mark Schurr, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Notre Dame and Chairperson of the Anthropology Department, is the 2008 Rodney F. Ganey, Ph.D. Faculty Community-Based Research Award winner. The award, in the amount of $5000, honors a Notre Dame faculty member whose research has made a contribution to a local community organization.
Dr. Schurr began research in 2003 with the Kankakee Valley Historical Society (KVHS) to learn about the diverse ways Native Americans responded to the forced removal from their land during the 1800’s. In the course of the project, more than 40 Notre Dame students conducted field work with an experienced team of professionals and over 200 volunteers who unearthed remnants of a past. Such work supports the aims of the KVHS, whose mission is the restoration and interpretation of the Kankakee Valley environment as well as preservation of archeological resources on the property.
Schurr’s work is recognized by peers as the largest archaeology project of any kind that engages the public as full participants in all aspects of the work.
Schurr received his Ph.D. from Indiana University in 1989 and a BS in Chemistry from Purdue University in 1977. Prior to his graduate studies, he worked as a chemist.
This award is funded by local entrepreneur and philanthropist, Rod Ganey, and awarded by the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Social Concerns. The Center facilitates community-based learning, research, and service for Notre Dame undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty. Since 1983, over 14,000 students and hundreds of faculty have been engaged in its courses and programs.
For more information about the Ganey Award visit socialconcerns.nd.edu/faculty.
Read Mark Schurr's faculty profile >
Archaeologist Glowacki Hits All the Right Notes
Donna Glowacki may be an archaeologist today, but when she first started thinking about a career, a shovel wasn’t her instrument of choice.
Enrolling at Miami University as a music major, she intended to devote her undergraduate years to mastering the trumpet. The summer before she left for college, however, a city youth employment program placed her at the SunWatch Indian Village/Archaeological Park. While her primary responsibilities were grounds-keeping, the job also gave Glowacki an opportunity to participate in the excavation of a 12th/13th-century Native American village.
“Turns out that I had an aptitude for seeing soil color differences and was detail-oriented,” she says, “and ended up spending most of that summer excavating and doing reconstruction at the stockaded village rather than mowing the lawn. I enjoyed that experience so much that within a year at Miami, I had changed majors and started my career as a professional archaeologist.”
Glowacki, who joined the Department this fall as John Cardinal O’Hara, C.S.C., Assistant Professor of Anthropology, specializes in the American Southwest and has conducted fieldwork at more than 60 of the largest sites in the Northern San Juan region. Most recently, she was co-project director of the Mesa Verde Village Assessment Project run by the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center.
Her current research focuses on examining the depopulation of the Northern San Juan region from A.D. 1150–1300, work that expands on her doctoral dissertation. In it, Glowacki showed that some sort of social disruption preceded the drought and increased violence commonly cited as the reasons why people left the area, which roughly corresponds to the “Four Corners” where the borders of Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico meet.
“My interests at the moment are exploring models to account for how remarkable changes in settlement organization and public architecture, paired with some key continuities, could have affected societal organization, particularly with respect to religious practices,” she says. “My other interest is in tracking pottery exchange networks using neutron activation analysis to determine how connected people were throughout the region prior to the depopulation.”
And with all due respect to her trumpet, Glowacki couldn’t be happier with the decision she made back during that first year of college.
“I think everyone has an inherent interest in the past, where we came from and just the cool, adventurous side of doing archaeology, but I never really thought one could actually make a living at it,” she says.
“Fortunately, I was wrong.”
Read Donna Glowacki's Faculty Profile >