JOHN M. CONNAWAY
has been an archaeologist with the Mississippi Department of Archives & History since November, 1968, and has for most of that time been in charge of the North Delta field office in Clarksdale. Born in 1941, after the loss of his father in the U.S. submarine service in World War II, he grew up in Helena, Arkansas in his grandparents‘ home. Graduating from high school in 1960, he attended the University of Mississippi where he earned his B.A. degree in Anthropology and Biology in 1964 and his M.A. degree in Anthropology in 1967. During his university years, he participated in several excavations, was a graduate assistant on two field schools, and excavated the Great White Mound near Grenada, Mississippi. After graduation and prior to joining the MDAH staff, he did archaeological salvage in southeast Missouri for the University of Missouri and excavated the Bonds Mississippian site in north Mississippi with the Mississippi Archaeological Association. Since 1968 he has excavated numerous sites over much of the state, and written several books and numerous articles.
ARNAUD GÉRARD A., Mgtr.,
es físico, músico y constructor de instrumentos musicales. Trabajó como profesor de la Carrera de Física de la Universidad Autónoma Tomás Frías (UATF) de Potosí, Bolivia (1986-2010), y fue fundador y responsable del Laboratorio de Acústica SoundLab de la Carrera de Física, donde realizó investigaciones en acústica musical, organología y etnomusicología, siendo autor de varios artículos en el área. El programa de investigación contempló particularmente el estudio acústico y organológico de instrumentos musicales rurales de la zona andina de Bolivia. Asimismo, dictó clases como profesor de Acústica y Organología en la Carrera de Artes Musicales de la UATF. Actualmente es miembro de la Sociedad Boliviana de Física (SOBOFI), investigador asociado del Instituto de Investigaciones Físicas de la Universidad Mayor de San Andrés (La Paz), investigador adscrito al Instituto de Investigación Antropológica y Arqueológica de la Universidad San Francisco Xavier de Chuquisaca e ingeniero de sonido en Acústica StudioLabde Potosí.
CHRISTOPHE HELMKE
holds a Ph.D. in Archaeology from the Institute of Archaeology, University of London (2009). He is Associate Professor of American Indian Languages and Cultures at the Institute of Cross-cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He served as illustrator and surveyor for the Western Belize Regional Cave Project that operated in the Roaring Creek Valley, between 1997 and 2001. Initially as field director and later as co-director of the Belize Valley Archaeological Reconnaissance project, he supervised the excavations of the Pook’s Hill plazuela between 1999 and 2005. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on archaeology, epigraphy, iconography and languages of Mesoamerica. Since 2000 he has tutored hieroglyphic workshops as part of a series of conferences in Europe as well as North and Central America. Besides Maya archaeology and epigraphy, other research interests include the pre-Columbian use of caves, Mesoamerican writing systems as well as rock art and comparative Amerindian mythology.
JONATHAN D. HILL
is Professor and former Chair of Anthropology at Southern Illinois University and Visiting Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Vytautus Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania. He is the author of Keepers of the Sacred Chants: The Poetics of Ritual Power in an Amazonian Society (1993) and Made-from-Bone: Trickster Myths, Music, and History from the Amazon (2009); editor of Rethinking History and Myth: Indigenous South American Perspectives on the Past (1988) and History, Power, and Identity: Ethnogenesis in the Americas, 1492-1992 (1996); and co-editor of Comparative Arawakan Histories: Rethinking Language Family and Culture Area in Amazonia (with Fernando Santos-Granero 2002), Burst of Breath: Indigenous Ritual Wind Instruments in Lowland South America(with Jean-Pierre Chaumeil 2011), and Ethnicity in Ancient Amazonia: Reconstructing Past Identities from Archaeology, Linguistics, and Ethnohistory (with Alf Hornborg 2011). His research interests include ethnohistory, ethnomusicology, and verbal art as performance with a focus on indigenous Amazonia. He has done fieldwork with the Arawak speaking Wakuénai (Curripaco) of southernmost Venezuela in the 1980s and ‘90s and is currently serving a three-year term (2014-2017) as President of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America (SALSA, www.salsa-tipiti.org).
MARK HOWELL, Ph.D.
is the Director of the Winterville Mounds (2006-present), a 12-mound Mississippian Period site and museum. Prior, he taught Music History at Fordham University (1999-2006) and Hunter College (1999-2004). More recently, he was a Senior Research Fellow with TOPOI in Berlin (2009-2012). Dr. Howell is currently working with Graeme Lawson, Jana Kubatzki, Arnd Adje Both, Ricardo Eichmann, and other colleagues, developing a master’s level degree program in music archaeology for the Berliner Antike-Kolleg (Freie Universität Berlin and Humboldt Universität).
MATTHIAS LEWY
is a postdoctoral research fellow in Ethnomusicology at the University of Brasilia (UNB), Brazil. His focus is on Amerindian sound ontologies in the Guianas as well as in ancient Mesoamerica.
KRISTINA NIELSEN
is currently a doctoral student at UCLA with an interest in pre-Columbian Mesoamerican instruments and modern reinterpretations of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican music and dance. She completed her B.M. in piano performance at Western Washington University in 2009, and later studied in the Native American Language and Cultures program at the University of Copenhagen, where her interests in Mesoamerica and music converged. Her recent research projects include an analysis of avian ocarinas from Pook’s Hill, Belize and researching the history of indigenous dances in Central Mexico. Kristina received her Masters in ethnomusicology from UCLA in 2013, and is currently researching the use of music and dance in the Los Angeles Danza Azteca community for her dissertation, which she will complete in June 2017.
DIANNE SCULLIN
received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Columbia University in 2015. Her current research investigates the music and sound practices of the Moche of the north coast of Peru. Her wider research interests include the materiality of sound and past soundscapes.