Ron Schirmer

1967-

Ron Schirmer was born on November 27th, 1967 in Wausau, Wisconsin. He grew up and graduated from a high school there. He majored in Anthropology and Philosophy at theUniversity of Wisconsin, Milwaukee and received a Bachelors Degree in 1990. Ron started in the Anthropology program for his Masters Degree at Minnesota State University, Mankato in 1993 and worked for Impact Services doing contract archaeology. He took a class with Dr. Strachan in anthropology, and the class roused his interest in understanding the interrelationships among distinct cultural groups that once inhabited Minnesota. According to Ron, he took about 120 credits as a graduate student at Minnesota State University, Mankato.

Dr. Schirmer was accepted by the University of Iowa and he began his coursework for his Ph.D. in Anthropology in the fall of 1995 before he graduated from Mankato, and he earned his Masters Degree in 1996. However, he received a one-year traveling scholar assistantship to study in the Quaternary Paleoecology Program at the University of Minnesota when he was in the Ph.D. program at the University of Iowa. At the end of that year, he decided to transfer to the University of Minnesota.

Dr. Schirmer had been working half time and attending classes half time until he was awarded a 13-month Traineeship through the Research Training Group, a National Science Foundation program in the Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior Departments. His doctoral research was on “the role of plants in late prehistoric cultural interaction and culture change in Upper Midwest, specifically at Red Wing, Minnesota.” He completed his Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Archaeological Studies, which emphasized archaeology and biology, in summer, 2002.

Today Dr. Schirmer is an Assistant Professor in the Anthropology Department and is also a Research Associate at the Science Museum of Minnesota. He is currently researching cultural interactions, ethnogenesis, and human/plant interrelations among pre-contact societies of the Midwest. The main focus of the field work is being done in Red Wing, an area where he’s been doing research since 1997. The questions Dr. Schirmer researching include how cultural interactions work among band/tribal level societies, how do human/plant interactions change with intensification in crop production, and archaeologically, how to tease out evidence of cultural interaction verses ethnogenesis. Dr. Schirmer is also editing his doctoral dissertation for publication and co-authoring and co-editing a new volume of Red Wing archaeology.

Reference:

Schirmer, Ron. Email correspondence. 9 Sep. 2002 - 18 Sep. 2002, 3 Feb. 2006

Edited by Travis Hager, 2006