Ladies and gentlemen, Dean, representatives of Eiszeit Quell, Colleagues, Students, and of course, Dr. Briana Doering, I am delighted to have the opportunity to present the Laudatio for Dr. Doering. Before I begin, I would like to note that Dr. Doering travelled here from Laramie, Wyoming, and those of you who know me know that I was born and raised in Wyoming and lived in Laramie for several years. With that in mind, in order to make Dr. Doering feel at home, I would like to extend an old Wyoming greeting to her: (casual remarks).
Two thousand twenty-three marks the twenty-fifth year of the Tübinger Förderpreis für Ältere Urgeschichte und Quartärökologie. By now we have the benefit of significant hindsight, so we know that many brilliant young scholars who received the prize have gone on to do great things and have had an incredible impact on the field of archaeology. It is obvious that Dr. Doering will be no different. As is the case every year, the pool of applicants was extremely impressive, though I would say that a consensus on the quality of Dr. Doering’s work emerged fairly early in the process. Once the discussions were done and the dust had settled, Dr. Doering was the clear winner.
On behalf of the jury, our sponsor, and in the name of the founder of the prize, I would like to present the winner of this year’s award, Dr. Briana Doering. Dr. Doering was born in 1989 and received her B.A. in Anthropology from Barnard College of Columbia University. She then moved on to the University of Michigan, where she earned her M.A. in Anthropological Archaeology in 2016 and Ph.D. in 2020. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wyoming (I would note here that an Assistant Professor is not equivalent to the German position Professor Assistant; an Assistant Professor is a tenure-track job that will most likely turn into a full Professor in the future). Dr. Doering’s main research area is in Alaska and she works on topics such as environmental and landscape archaeology, Indigenous archaeology, human-animal relationships, migration, spatial organization, isotopic and geochemical analysis, resilience and adaptation, and lithic technologies, among many others. As we will see, these interests came together in her doctoral thesis, which examined the circumstances surrounding the migration of Dene/Athabascan populations into the contiguous United States, as far south as Arizona.
Dr. Doering has numerous publications in important venues such as the Journal of Archaeological Science Reports, American Antiquity, Quaternary Science Reviews, PaleoAmerica, and the Alaska Journal of Anthropology. She taught multiple classes as a graduate student and has a diverse teaching program as part of her position at Wyoming. Dr. Doering has been the excavation director at about half a dozen sites in Alaska, and also teaches a field school there. In 2020, she defended her dissertation under the supervision of Brian Stewart to receive her Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropological Archaeology at the University of Michigan. The title of her dissertation is “Evaluating the Social and Environmental Processes of the Athabascan Migration.” It is for this work that she is awarded the Tübinger Förderpreis. The study, which I will discuss briefly, is an example of rigorous hypothesis testing using multiple different analytic methods, guided by an explicit theoretical framework.
In her dissertation, Dr. Doering seeks to understand the cause behind the Dene/Athabascan migration. During this migration, which began about 1500 years ago, people belonging to the Dene/Athabascan language group who were living in central Alaska and Yukon, in the modern-day United States and Canada, left their homeland and went as far south as the American Southwest. A large body of linguistic, genetic, oral history, and archaeological data testify to this migration, and for many decades the conventional wisdom has been that a volcanic eruption drove Dene/Athabascan people away from their homes and into new environments, thousands of kilometers away. Dr. Doering challenges the very premise of the explanation, noting that archaeologists are quick to employ environmental factors as catalyzing major change, which is perhaps not surprising given that large, geologically visible events such as volcanic eruptions are intuitively big and scary, not to mention being nice chronological markers for an archaeological study. As an alternative, Dr. Doering hypothesizes that social factors, namely group reorganization related to the kinship structure, led to population growth and a gradual process that resulted in the migration of Dene/Athabascan groups south. If I can pause for a moment and say, this is smart. Really smart. It’s like when you are watching an Olympic figure skater or professional football player and they make something hard look easy. That is what Dr. Doering did. She realized that a sudden dramatic environmental event would lead to sudden dramatic change archaeologically, and a more gradual process would look different archaeologically. The idea is simple and elegant, and testable, but it takes a lot of work. Which she also did.
For her dissertation, Dr. Doering excavated four archaeological sites with five time components bracketing either side of the volcanic eruption thought to have precipitated the Dene/Athabascan migration. At each of the sites she conducted a thorough lithic analysis to see if and how tool production and raw material selection changed. She also analyzed isotopes from lipids in hearth features and integrated these data with information from faunal studies to understand the composition of human diets. Finally, Dr. Doering conducted a large metadata analysis from two huge radiocarbon databases (one from the US and one from Canada) to see how site and landscape use changed relative to the number and size of sites. Overall, she found that leading up to the Dene/Athabascan migration, many changes had been gradually occurring over the hundreds of years before the move. Lithic toolkits became more specialized and populations intensified their use of upland and lowland resources. The lowlands, in particular, became important as people relied more heavily on fishing. Taken together, the evidence indicates that populations were on the rise well before the volcanic eruption in question. She then ties the entire work together by exploring kinship structures of Dene/Athabascan groups, and determines that related changes in social organization could explain the population growth.
As I was preparing this introduction, one of the things that really struck me is that Dr. Doering combines some of the very best traits of old school archaeology with the reflectiveness and sensitivity of a new generation of scholars. In an old school sense, she excavated multiple sites and conducted three vastly different kinds of analysis. This is something you rarely see today in a hyper-specialized field, and I suspect it would not be possible in a region more heavily populated by archaeologists, for example southwestern France. At the same time, Dr. Doering’s work is heavily question driven, with a strong theoretical base, and critically, human beings are central to her research in a way that is often lost. This is especially important as she is working on the archaeology of Indigenous communities, and the respect and dignity that she rightfully affords to Dene/Athabascan populations is so fundamental to her approach, that her core research question provides agency to the people by challenging the long-standing environmental deterministic explanation for their migration. In my view, this kind of work represents the only future archaeology can ethically have in contexts marred by colonialism. On a lighter note, I also want to mention that Dr. Doering is a really excellent writer, and my students know that I never say that about anybody.
Ladies and gentlemen, I am certain that in this brief introduction, I have not done justice to the depth and significance of Dr. Doering’s research. It is my pleasure to now introduce you to Dr. Briana Doering so she can do so herself. The title of her talk today is “Exploring early cooking traditions in Arctic North America via targeted excavations and molecular methods.” On behalf of the jury and our sponsor, I would again like to express our heartfelt congratulations.