Adrianne Daggett Researches Prehistoric Kalahari Desert Settlements

If you’re an archaeologist or anthropologist and you have never heard of Petridish.org, well, you may have perhaps missed out on an opportunity to fund your research. This site is making great strides towards fulfilling the goals of many PhD candidates and Master’s students. Additionally, the site involves the public, that’s you, in the research. Interested science enthusiasts, anthropologists, families, archaeologists and educators are all investing their own personal interests in several projects.

You can back your favorite projects now with small donations, and in exchange, researchers will provide insider updates on their progress, acknowledgements and unique rewards. The researchers may provide you souvenirs from the field or naming rights, but these perks are at the sole discretion of the researcher. Make sure you read the details of their pages carefully.

One project has caught my attention called the ‘Prehistoric Kalahari Desert Settlements”. Adrianne Daggett is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Michigan State University, specializing in Later Holocene southern African archaeology. She is conducting research on farmers and how they survived in the Kalahari Desert.

Daggett’s project will seek to understand the way the unique resources of the Makgadikgadi Pans, a giant salt pan complex in northeastern Botswana, may have contributed to the social and economic development of the community in this area that grew cereals, kept sheep and goats, and traded with other regions of southern Africa for a century or more.

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