May 21, 2026 To celebrate our 2026 Research Grant recipients , we connected with this year’s awardees to learn more about their projects and the unique paths that led them into the field of archaeology. We’re thrilled to introduce Dominique Langis-Barsetti, one of three recipients of the prestigious 2026 Kathleen and David Boochever Endowment for Fieldwork and Scientific Analyses Grant ! Justin Pargeter (New York University) Tell us about your project: Around 2,000 years ago, herding arrived in southern Africa — one of the last places on Earth where people made the shift from hunting and gathering to food production. But why then, and why there? This project investigates whether a drying climate was the trigger, testing the idea that increasingly arid conditions between 4,000 and 2,000 years ago made forager life less predictable and opened new pathways for livestock to spread southward.…