BIOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY SECTION

Accomplishments during 2004:

Overview: The Biological Anthropology Section has continued to recruit both regular members and student members. As we have done for several years now, we staffed an information booth at the Annual Meetings of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in April 2004, passing out a flyer entitled "Ten Good Reasons to Join the Biological Anthropology Section of AAA." We had two submissions for the annual Student Paper Award, but neither was presented because of the change in venue, so we did not make an award this year. This would have been the fourth year of our Distinguished Lecture and reception, but that has been postponed to next year's meeting in Washington. I used the email list to send announcements about our sessions and the Distinguished Lecture in early fall subsequently involved members in discussions surrounding the move of the annual meeting from San Francisco to Atlanta. Members seemed to appreciate being "kept in the loop." We have decided to send out something to the membership about once a month from now on. We did not have a quorum for our Business Meeting but discussed issues of importance to members of BAS with the 10 people who attended.

Website: We continue to maintain a good website that includes many links and a listing of AAA sessions of potential interest to our members.

Membership: Our membership stands at 569 members as of October 31, 2004, compared with 559 a year ago. This includes 330 Regular Members and 239 student members, a new category introduced in 2002 to increase involvement of biological anthropologists with the section and the AAA.

Budget: Our net assets at the beginning of the year were $14,863, and we added revenues of $4,467 for a total of $19,330. Expenses for 2003 were $5,400. We approved one change to the budget, which was to set travel reimbursement at $250-$300 so that we can maintain flexibility in the event that our expenses rise, now that we have added the Distinguished Lecture and reception.

Book Award: We continue to seek candidate books for the WW Howells Book Award, which is given to the author at the annual meeting. This year the winner was John Relethford for his book Reflections of our Past, published by Westview in 2003 .

Distinguished Lecture: The Distinguished Lecture and Cash Bar Reception begun in 2001, was cancelled this year but will be held at the 2005 meetings in Washington with George Armelagos of Emory University as the speaker.

Sponsored Sessions: The BAS had planned a number of sessions for the AAA meetings: New Views from Biological Anthropology; Correlating Genes, Language, and Culture: Insights into Native American Prehistory; Current Research in Biological Anthropology; Tensions, Theory, Directions in Bioarchaeology; Human Behavioral Ecology: Applications to Policy and Development; New Perspectives in Biocultural Studies of Health; The People of the Aleutian Islands: Origins,Cultural and Genetic Variation; The Biocultural Evolution of Cuisine: What's on the Menu? Science and Ritual in Every Day Eating Behaviors. Only one of the sessions was held in Atlanta.

Officers: New Officers for the 2004 Meeting Year include Chair, Leslie Lieberman (llieberm@mail.ucf.edu); Chair Elect Trudy Turner (trudy@uwm.edu), and Member-at-Large Karen Weinstein. Officers who ended their terms in 2004 included Chair Wenda Trevathan (wtrevath@nmsu.edu) and Member-at-Large Jim McKenna (James.J.McKenna.25@nd.edu).

2. Future Plans

One important goal this year is to make sure that we don't lose members or member's interest as a result of the switch of the annual meeting from San Francisco to Atlanta. We had an excellent set of sessions to draw attendance at the meetings and hope to replicate that at the 2005 meetings in Washington by encouraging resubmission of those that were cancelled. We plan to use our listserv to send announcements of interest to our members, hoping to increase their involvement in BAS and AAA activities. In particular, we plan to survey our student members to see what other services and benefits we can offer them. A primary goal is to engage and retain our student base. If there is interest, we may plan a workshop and/or reception for students to be held at the AAA meetings, perhaps in conjunction with the Distinguished Lecture. As noted above, we will continue to host a Distinguished Lecture and Reception at the AAA meetings, recruit students for the student poster/paper prize, and seek nominations for the Howell's Prize. We are also exploring possibilities of putting original papers on the website and otherwise making it more useful to our members.

In conclusion, the Biological Anthropology Section has been mostly concerned with increasing the number of members and increasing involvement in the AAA and the annual meeting. We will be urging members to submit sessions for the meeting, run for office, and join the section and the AAA. We expect these efforts to be reflected in the continuing increase in membership and revenues for the section in the future.