History
Established in 2020, the Human Evolution and Virtual Archaeology Laboratory (HEVA) builds on the century-old natural and applied science foundation of the University of Kentucky’s Department of Anthropology, instituted in 1927 by William S. Webb, a physicist, and William D. Funkhouser, a zoologist.
William S. Webb, Professor of Physics and Anthropology, College of Arts and Sciences.
Source: ExploreUK
Early 20th Century: Foundations of Human Evolution and Archaeological Science at the University of Kentucky
Webb and Funkhouser were instrumental in applying empirical approaches and emerging archaeological science methods to reconstructing the history of the Commonwealth of Kentucky and the greater southern region of the United States. Prior to joining the University of Kentucky Physics faculty in 1914, Webb was employed by the Government Land Office of the Seminole Nation and became fluent in the Seminole language, lending additional expertise to the maturing of anthropology in Kentucky.
William D. Funkhouser, Professor of Zoology and Anthropology; Dean of Graduate School.
Source: ExploreUK
Funkhouser was an influential supporter of teaching evolutionary theory, following the nation’s first anti-evolution bill introduced by the Kentucky legislature in 1922 (House Bill 191). While the bill failed to pass by one vote, efforts later succeeded in the neighboring state of Tennessee with passage of the Butler Act in 1925, which prohibited teaching on the evolution of humans in state public institutions. University of Kentucky alumnus and former Funkhouser student John T. Scopes served as defendant challenging the Butler Act in the legal case colloquially referred to as the “Scopes monkey trial,” i.e. The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes.
Webb and Funkhouser later established the Museum of Anthropology in 1931. The Department and Museum were industrious in archaeological and paleontological research, with productivity in excavations and research sustained largely through federal relief funds from the Works Progress Administration New Deal programs.
Mid-20th Century to Present
In 1941, the Wenner-Gren Aeronautical Research Laboratory was established at the University of Kentucky (now the Department of Biomedical Engineering)—an aircraft research facility that included training chimpanzees for space flight. Enos, a chimpanzee trained at the Wenner-Gren lab for NASA’s Project Mercury, became the first and thus far only of his species (Pan troglodytes) to orbit the Earth in 1961, paving the way for additional members of our species (Homo sapiens) to be launched into space by NASA.
Graduate Assistant Theodore Powers with a chimpanzee trained with U.S. Air Force aeromedical research and the Wenner-Gren Lab's Project Mercury-era work.
Source: ExploreUK
During the 1950s and 1960s, the Department of Anthropology had a thriving physical (i.e. biological) anthropology curriculum and was highly regarded for its pedagogy on the subject, employing methods of teaching via television that at the time were highly innovative. Programming targeted students and the general public to disseminate knowledge on human biology from an evolutionary framework. As a result, it has been said that physical anthropology was better known in Kentucky than in any other state at the time.
Subsequent decades saw strong opposition to the teaching of evolution in general and human evolution in particular. In addition, anthropology at the University of Kentucky followed national disciplinary trends of increasingly allying with social science disciplines. The Department of Anthropology launched the doctoral program in the mid-1960s and became a stronghold for applying anthropological theory and methods to contemporary contexts, hosting the country’s first Applied Anthropology graduate program in 1968. Advanced undergraduate and graduate-level courses in human evolution and primate evolution were seldom offered prior to the inception of HEVA.
Today, HEVA promotes the transdisciplinarity that defines Anthropology at the University of Kentucky since its founding, building on the “four-field” (i.e. archaeology, biology, ethnology, and linguistics) U.S.-American tradition of the discipline. HEVA supports both fundamental and applied research and collaborates across Departments and Colleges at the University of Kentucky and beyond. In a testament to this commitment, members of HEVA have been funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, among other entities. HEVA also seeks to continue the legacy of innovative pedagogy, offering a mix of lecture- and project- based courses in person and on-line, archaeological field schools, and a range of public dissemination activities.
Text: Hugo Reyes-Centeno; Research: Matthew Brooks and Hugo Reyes-Centeno
