Anthropologist wins best dissertation award

CARBONDALE, Ill. -- An anthropologist who used excavation, archived documents, geographic information systems and statistics to study an obscure Central American Maya culture has won Southern Illinois University Carbondale's Outstanding Dissertation award.

Timothy A. Pugh will receive a $1,000 cash prize during SIUC commencement ceremonies May 11 for work showing the relationship between architecture, ritual and ethnic identity. His work also sheds new light on a little known 450-year period. Pugh is now a visiting assistant professor at Queens College of the City University of New York in Flushing, N.Y.

Janice F. Ward, a doctoral graduate in educational psychology and special education who explored the process by which graduate students evolved into counselors, was runner-up. She is now a counselor at Franklin Elementary School in Cape Girardeau, Mo., and an adjunct instructor for the Masters in Counseling program at Southeast Missouri State University. She will join the Arkansas State University faculty as an assistant professor in August.

Pugh's research focused on the central lakes region of Peten in Guatemala, home of two warring groups of Maya, the Kowoj and the Itza. Both peoples had at some point in the past left their native Yucatan in Mexico for Guatemala's lowlands and were among the last of Central America's Maya populations to succumb to Spanish conquerors.

In what Maya expert Prudence M. Rice of SIUC described as "meticulous fieldwork," Pugh conducted large-scale excavations of temple complexes and homes at a site called Zacpeten.

"He developed a singular methodology for clearing and excavating the ritual and domestic structures that allowed him to carefully register the location of each artifact," wrote Rice in a letter outlining the importance of Pugh's work.

"When these data were entered into a computer database, he was able to map out the distributions of ritually important objects -- incense burners, crystals used in divination, figurines and so on -- thus allowing him to understand where particular kinds of activities had taken place on the floors of the temple platforms and rooms. This level of analysis has never before been done on any Post-classic site in the Maya lowlands, and so he was able to arrive at an incomparable level of insight into the nature of ritual activity."

By careful study of Spanish and Mayan documents and analysis of architecture and artifacts, Pugh also showed that the Kowoj, not the Itza, lived in Zacpeten. In addition, he demonstrated that modern Mayas living in lowland forests in Chiapas, Mexico, descend from Kowoj refugees who fled from the Spanish near the start of the 18th century.

"This is a remarkable, new and important finding for all of those interested in the Maya and their history," wrote SIUC archaeologist Charles A. Hofling in his letter assessing Pugh's work. "It is a discovery that was only possible by control of enormous amounts of literature in the fields of history, archaeology, epigraphy, linguistics and cultural anthropology along with a mastery of archaeological methods and anaylsis."

Hofling believes that Pugh has developed a model for scholars interested in understanding the relationship between buildings and the activities that take place in them.

"This includes a wide array of scholars in the social sciences and humanities," he wrote. "I consider Dr. Pugh's dissertation to be a path-breaking piece of scholarship based on a tremendous amount of research, at once rock-solid empirically and theoretically innovative."

Pugh earned his bachelor's degree in 1988 from the University of Tennessee Chattanooga and his master's degree in 1991 from the University of Memphis.

SIUC's dissertation competition has been held annually since 1988 and is sponsored by retired professors Richard E. and Donna T. Falvo.