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William I. Woods Winner of the
2006 Robert McC. Netting Award It gives me great pleasure to
present this testimonial for Bill Woods – an individual whose work has so
long crossed geography and anthropology and who embodies the spirit of the
Netting Award. Bill is currently
Professor of Geography, Courtesy Professor of Anthropology, and Director of
the Environmental Studies Program at Kansas University. Previously he was
Professor of Geography, Affiliated Faculty Member in the Environmental
Studies Program, and Director of the Office of Contract Archaeology at
Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SUIE). He received a B.A. in anthropology in 1970
from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, a M.A. in 1973 and a Ph.D. in 1986
in geography from that same institution.
His education and academic career have constantly straddled the
disciplines of geography and anthropology. I’d like to share a little
story about Bill. In 1993 he took a
gamble on me. Bill used a SIUE
internal grant to take myself, and Joe McCann, both graduate students in
geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as well as Neil Whitehead,
faculty in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to the
Brazilian Amazon for reconnaissance work on Terra Preta
(Black Earth) soils, now known as Amazonian Dark Earths (ADE). I came along as Portuguese speaker and with
a general interest in soils and people.
My own research at the time took a different direction, although it
has since circled back to ADE, but Bill’s has since taken off on the
subject. That exploratory trip set
Bill Woods off on the path that has propelled him to the forefront of ADE
research. In fact Bill has become the
lynchpin in ADE research. He is the
co-editor of two volumes about ADE, and has coordinated the activities of
American, Brazilian, and German scientists on the subject. Bill and I are now organizing a special
symposium on the topic at the upcoming World Congress of Soil Science in
Philadelphia, July 2006. But ADE is not the only thing
Bill is known for. Bill has been
studying prehistoric cultivation throughout his career and is known for his
studies of erosion of archaeological sites.
Most impressively, he is the primary soil scientist at the site of
Cahokia in Illinois, the largest prehistoric Indian settlement in North
America. His involvement with that
site is long-standing and profound. He
is also well known for the development of techniques for examining soils in
archaeological sites, especially the quantitative analysis of soil
phosphate. For this impressive body of
work in interdisciplinary cultural ecology, I congratulate Bill Woods for the
Robert McC. Netting Award. A. WinklerPrins |
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Page last updated April 11, 2006 |
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