Professor brings excavations into the classroom

Many professors at the University of Rhode Island participate in interesting fieldwork outside of their academic life, and one has gone deep into Africa to find fossils.

Dr. Holly Dunsworth, an associate professor of anthropology at URI, combines her hands-on experience in excavations around the world with her students’ learning in the classroom.

Dunsworth teaches the APG 201 class I am enrolled in, Human Origins, just as she teaches every class, with electric enthusiasm. This energy inspires students outside the realm of anthropology and science in general to become engaged with the course material. Personally, before the class, science was not even my radar since I am an English major. Dunsworth started explaining to the class how important anthropology and understanding anthropology was through her fieldwork adventures and allowed us to hold, touch and examine fossils that she found herself in the depths of Africa. The subject no longer existed just in the textbook.

Dunsworth discovered her own love of anthropology in college as well. She attended the University of Florida, and did not declare anthropology as her major until her junior year.

“One day at college I found what I thought was a really cool looking bone on the ground,” Dunsworth said. “Due to my constant thirst for knowledge, I brought this bone to my professor and asked him what it was, because I thought I was really on to something. After a quick examination of the bone he chuckled and told me this was a chicken wing! … I did not enjoy the feeling of not-knowing and so you could say my first mistake in anthropology truly sparked my need to know more and more about the subject.”  

As an undergraduate student Dunsworth went on her first study-abroad program in Kenya. While there she was involved with paleoanthropology activities such as excavating prospected fossils surrounding Lake Turkana. Approximately two to three million years ago the lake was larger and the area more fertile, making it a center for early hominins.

In 1984 the Turkana Boy, a nearly complete skeleton of a Homo ergaster boy, was discovered by Kamoya Kimeu. In this inspiring setting, the fossils Dunsworth discovered alongside her classmates and professors were of early human history, such as Homo erectus. Dunsworth recalls sitting down after a long day of back-breaking work and writing down in her journal, “This is what I’m supposed to be doing.”  

After her first field-work experience in Kenya, which proved to be the pivotal point in her career in anthropology, she applied to a PhD. program at Pennsylvania State University and was accepted. During her time in the program her parents questioned what she was going to do with such an extraneous major like anthropology, but Dunsworth was unmoved.

“Anthropology isn’t just about evolution, bones, or primatology, sure all these things are a part of anthropology,” Dunsworth said. “But to me the value of anthropology is much greater than these subjects, because it prepares you to think cross-culturally, to see through a more global scope and to have an understanding for depth of time while incorporating critical thinking.”

Most recently, Dunsworth traveled to Africa in the winter of 2013 to continue her research on ancient fossils embedded deep into the ground. She also had a baby about a year ago, which has prevented her from going overseas to continue her fieldwork for a short time. She is keeping busy by writing a book on anthropology in the meantime.