College of the Redwoods Anthropology Professor Dr. Justine Shaw will present her Portugal Award lecture examining the question “How did Maya people survive the collapse of their society?” on Wednesday, February 26, 2020 at 7pm in the CR Theater at the Eureka Campus. The lecture will take place again on March 10 at 5pm in room DN 29 at the CR Del Norte Campus in Crescent City.

Named after the college’s first president, the College of the Redwoods Foundation Board established the Dr. Eugene Portugal Award in 1993 to honor an outstanding faculty member and to exhibit the academic and professional contributions CR faculty make to the institution and the community.

Professor Shaw will share information from her research and excavation work that demonstrated how the Maya did not, in fact, vanish. Instead, their society underwent a period of decline that took place over several hundred years, first in the south and later in the north.  Their progeny are still here today, planting their fields, working in hotels, making things in factories, and earning advanced degrees in universities. 

Justine Shaw has been teaching at College of the Redwoods since 1999. She received her B.A. from the University of Arizona and M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from Southern

Methodist University. She did her graduate research in the Yucatan Peninsula.

Her interests include the varied nature of Maya roads (sacbeob), as well as the Terminal Classic period (time of the Maya 'collapse'). She spends many summers in the field on her settlement survey project, which includes archaeologists from Mexico, the United States, and other parts of the world and has documented 105 distinct sites since 2000.

Her publications include Archaeology in Quintana Roo (with Jennifer Mathews), White Roads of the Yucatan: Changing Social Landscapes of the Lowland Maya, and The Maya of the Cochuah Region: Archaeological and Ethnographic Perspectives on the Northern Lowlands.  Justine enjoys bringing her experience from the field into the classroom to provide real-world examples from archaeology, biological anthropology, and cultural anthropology.

For more information, contact Stephanie Burres, Administrative Assistant to the VP of Instruction, 476-4109, or email stephanie-burres@redwoods.edu

                                                      ###