Achievement

NYU Trainee Myra Laird participated in an inter-university and multidisciplinary archaeological and paleontological expedition to Rusinga Island in Kenya in summer 2011. She received training in vertebrate paleontology, geology and paleoecology at fossil primate localities of Miocene age (supervised by CUNY/IGERT faculty member Will Harcourt-Smith), and she carried out additional archaeological research at late Pleistocene-Holocene localities (supervised by NYU/IGERT faculty member Christian Tryon). As part of the latter project she studied human remains from the archaeological site of Kisesi 2 in Tanzania, and she is currently working on a description of the material for publication, focusing on their implications for understanding East African Holocene human variation. She is also part of a larger collaborative team project that intends to resume investigations at Kisesi.