I am a senior Anthropology major at the University of Missouri-St. Louis(UMSL)www.umsl.edu and currently enrolled in the Fall 2006 semester. This webpage has been constructed as part of an assignment for a course in cognitive anthropology at UMSL. The purpose of the assignment was to familiarize the class with web design through the designing of our own personal web page. The class will then take what we have learned and apply it to a collaborative project, which is to create an on-line resource for defining the vocabulary that is utilized in cognitive anthropology. Upon project completion there will be a link provided from this web page to the projects web page.
I became interested in seeking a Bachelors degree in Anthropology after a weekend trip to
The Windy City, Chicago, Illinois. My wife and I took the trip to celebrate our
first wedding anniversary. I was to find inspiration from our visit to The Field Museum www.fieldmuseum.org while my wife was to find boredom. The most memorable exhibit at the field museum
was within their Ancient Egyptian collection. It was small and consisted of a stuffed Baboon and a plaque. The plaque
explained how in ancient Egypt the Baboon was used for manual labor in agriculture, digging rows for crops, and also assisted
in law enforcement, much like a K-9 unit today. This blew my mind. I was so inspired by our visit to The Field Museum
that once we returned I immeadiately registered for the upcoming semester at UMSL.
In order to graduate from UMSL's Anthropology Department there is a required senior thesis project. My senior thesis
project is a combination of visual anthropology, ethnography, and archaeology. The theme so far is researching the importance that harmony
has in the Native American Osage Nation, specifically in how it relates to cosmology, tribal structure, and daily life. The archaeological part comes in
in to play by examing the layout of Cahokia Mounds, through the perspective of the Osage paradigm of harmony. Through the help of Dr. Pattie Wright
of the UMSL Anthropology Department I was able to
schedule my first interview with Congressman Eddy Red Eagle of the Osage Nation, which will be over Fall Break.
chunking- a process in which humans are able to circumvent the limitations of short-term
memory, described in (Miller 1965). Grouping a number of things together into one thing.
Example:
chunking of the digits 19911989 is easier to recall
than the digits 69325754. The use of 4 digits to designate the years 1990 and 1989 allows for remembering two distinct series of digits instead of recalling a series of
eight digits.