I recently completed work on the osseous material from the Donner Party campsite. The Donner Party was a large group of 87 immigrants who traveled out west (to California) in 1846. They suffered from bad luck and bad choices that left them stranded in October in the Sierra Nevada Mountains during one of the worst winters in 100 years, just 100 miles from the safety of Sutter�s Fort. The group is almost synonymous with the idea of starvation cannibalism as many members of relief and rescue parties returned with macabre reports befitting their Victorian sentiments. My work involved examining tiny burned fragments of bone from a hearth at the camp site to determine whether the fragments belonged to human or non-human animals (see this presentation from the 2005 Society for Historical Archaeology meetings in Sacramento). In 2007, several students at Appalachian completed analysis of bone fragments from the campsite hearth as part of a larger project that reconstructed life at the camp, which was featured in an article in The New Yorker magazine (Dana Goodyear--April 24, 2006) and on a History Channel special Cannibalism: Secrets Revealed, which aired originally in the spring of 2006. The more recent, expanded analysis of over 100 bones (out of 16000 fragments smaller than 1/2" in diameter) demonstrates that the butchered, burned and fragmented bones from the hearth belonged to many mammals (including cows, horses, deer, and most likely the family dog) but that humans were not among the refuse. An article entitled Archaeology of the Donner Party Alder Creek Camp is forthcoming in American Antiquity and in a chapter in an edited volume co-authored with several undergraduate students at ASU (forthcoming in 2009 from University of Nebraska Press).

Previous projects include an examination of dental histology as an age estimation tool in skeletons from 8000 B.C. I used cementum annulations to estimate age at death for adult skeletons from Damdama (Robbins et al. 2004 Histology and Age Estimation at Damdama (World Cat Listing). This work will be included in a chapter on a forthcoming monograph for that site (Lukacs and Pal, in press).