Chickasaw Nation Honors UA Student for Thesis

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – The Chickasaw Nation recently presented a University of Alabama graduate student with its Heritage Preservation Award in recognition of his archaeological and historical research.

Brad Lieb, a Ridgeland, Miss. native and a doctoral student in UA’s anthropology department, was honored during the 2006 Chickasaw Nation Arts and Culture Awards ceremony held in Tishomingo, Okla. He was honored for his thesis, “The Grand Village Is Silent: An Archaeological and Ethnohistorical Study of the Natchez Indian Refuge Among the Chickasaws in the Eighteenth Century.”

Lieb’s research focuses on the rapid cultural adaptations occurring in American Indian societies from 1540 to 1840 in Mississippi and across the Southeast. Also, he is working to preserve Chickasaw heritage sites near Tupelo, Miss., and he is involved in analyzing major National Park Service collections of Chickasaw cultural material excavated at sites from the 1700s near Tupelo.

Lieb is in his second year in UA’s doctoral program. He earned his bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Mississippi State University before earning his master’s degree from UA in 2005.

The department of anthropology is part of UA’s College of Arts and Sciences, the University’s largest division and the largest public liberal arts college in the state. Students from the College have won numerous national awards including Rhodes Scholarships, Goldwater Scholarships, and memberships on the USA Today Academic All American Team.