Joss Whittaker is a doctoral candidate in anthropology (archaeology) at the University of Washington, Seattle. His Fulbright project, “Trade and Power in Northwest Aru,” examine how engagement with long-distance trade networks has changed life in Ujir, a small community in eastern Indonesia’s Aru Islands, over the past thousand years. Although remote even today, Ujir’s changing relationship with global trade over several centuries is visible through artifacts and abandoned settlements.

This research is an interdisciplinary collaborative effort with archaeologists at Balai Arkeologi Maluku, sociocultural anthropologists at Universitas Indonesia and Universitas Pattimura, historians and anthropologists from Linnaeus University, and members of the present community at Ujir. Joss has also received support from a US National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant. He hopes to complete the project by December 2018.