Before the summer, anthropology department announced the recipients of the Robert W. Susan Graduate Student Research Award. Zhengwei (and Brad Jones) are the winners of the prize for 2019-2020. Congratulations Zhengwei and Brad!
The nomination letter reads: “Zhengwei Zhang is a doctoral candidate in the fifth year of the graduate program in Anthropology. works on issues concerning human adaptation to high altitude environments in Tibet. This is an exciting time for archaeological innovations on the Tibetan Plateau. There is considerable momentum in understanding the region’s ancient history, and the consequent knowledge is having profound implications for our knowledge of the human past on a global scale. Together with his peer colleagues, Zhang’s work contributes significantly to this recent flourish by bringing a suite of archaeological and scientific techniques to bear upon the understanding of human subsistence in a range of marginal environments on the plateau. As one of the first zooarchaeologists to do systematic work in the region Zhengwei is developing new methods of identification of Tibetan bovids and pioneering the intra-tooth isotopic approach and situating his archaeological finding in innovative conceptual frameworks. His research at Bangga combines systematic zooarchaeological study and sequential stable isotope analyses, the first such investigation in the region. At Bangga he has discovered disease challenges for sheep herders which are likely connected with the distinctive patterns of animal movement discovered. His research at Xiaoenda revealed that small scale farmers were relying heavily on hunting rather than herding as previously assumed. Zhang has published several peer-reviewed articles. His work on localized hunting in the eastern Tibetan Plateau published in Quaternary International in 2019 has already received wide general reference, signifying significant contributions to not only regional archaeology, but to broader anthropological debate on diverse human subsistence in the past. ”