Will Russell
2009 Student Awards and Scholarships
Dons and Doñas of Arizona Award
The Dons and Doñas of Arizona have supported the study, preservation and public presentation of Southwestern history for over 65 years. Part of their mission includes the award of scholarships to exceptional ASU students whose academic programs focus on the American Southwest. Recipients must be full-time students who are
"It is hard for me to put into words the transformation I have gone through since coming to ASU and becoming part of the SHESC family. For the first time in my academic and professional life, I have felt like I was where I belonged."
— Will Russell
Having grown up on a ranch in Cochise County and attended Tombstone High School, Will is very connected to the American Southwest and its peoples. One could say that Southwestern archaeology is in his blood. "My family is Native American, and I understand the importance of both preserving Native cultures and understanding indigenous histories," he explains.
Wanting to have a voice in how the Native past is dealt with and understood, Will began his studies in sociocultural anthropology. After taking a course from Greg Schachner, he became so fascinated by archaeology that he changed his focus, though he still maintains that ethnography and archaeology should be closely intertwined.
Will's contributions to Southwestern archaeology are already impressive. He has been published multiple times and has several papers currently under review by major archaeology journals. And his research has produced some intriguing finds.
Using ethnographic data on elephant hunting by African Native groups, Will developed a predictive model for locating Clovis period camp sites in the New World. Employing this approach, he located and recorded 5 Paleoindian sites in southeastern Arizona. This research was presented at the 2007 New Directions in American Indian Research conference at Chapel Hill and as a poster at the 20th Annual Southwest Symposium.
For his senior thesis, Will examined linear ground features in the Perry Mesa region of central Arizona in conjunction with the Legacies on the Landscape Project. He expanded the known sample from 8 to 45 and ultimately made the argument that they were formalized ceremonial racetracks used to integrate a multi-ethnic community with components from several other areas of the Southwest. The results of his research were presented in a poster at the 73rd Annual SAA meeting in Vancouver, for which he received travel grants from the School of Human Evolution and Social Change and the Arizona Archaeological Society. The poster was an invited entry in the Amerind Foundation's inaugural archaeology poster competition, where it was a semi-finalist. The data from the project have also been presented at a Legacies symposium, to the Arizona Archaeological Society and at a school brown bag session.
As a volunteer with the South Mountain Rock Art Project, Will developed a rock art illustration protocol and authored the project's motif coding schema. His work on the project led to an internship with the Center for Desert Archaeology, followed by a paid archaeological position with ASU's Archaeological Research Institute.
His current research focuses on prehistoric Mimbres ceramic iconography. He has created a methodology for the systematic identification of single artists in Mimbres society, thus suggesting craft specialization between the 10th and 12th centuries.
In 2007, Will attended the ASU field school operated as part of the Mogollon Prehistoric Landscapes Project. Last year, he returned as a teaching assistant, and he plans to do so again this summer.
Will has been accepted into ASU's doctoral anthropology program and plans to continue to focus on Southwestern archaeology. He is particularly interested in the issues of late prehistoric migration, coalescence and identity. He hopes to use a multi-faceted approach to understanding the past, including attention to ethnographic data, iconography and Native oral tradition. Ultimately, Will hopes to teach at the university level.
Special thanks to:
Peggy Nelson, Kate Spielmann and Michelle Hegmon. Will is also grateful to Dave Abbott, Keith Kintigh, Betsy Brandt, Ben Nelson, Arleyn Simon, Mike Smith and Curtis Marean. In addition, he would like to recognize a number of graduate students who have become close friends and mentors, including Aaron Wright, Matt Peeples, Melissa Kruse, Karen Schollmeyer, Steve Swanson, Colleen Strawhacker, Chris Roberts, Greg Schachner and Chris Watkins.
