SEBIG
South-Eastern Bioanthropology Interest Group
Mission
This academic interest community is dedicated to creating and maintaining a diverse, inclusive, and friendly community of scientists and social scientists. We welcome students, researchers, and faculty interested in Biological Anthropology to join us for networking and for sharing our experience and scholarship with one another. The annual meeting is a particularly good opportunity for students to present their ideas ahead of professional conferences, receive feedback from professors and other students.
We meet once a year in February or March in the Southeastern United States, typically in North Carolina, but if you are interested in hosting a meeting in your southern state please get in touch! We would love to expand our community to the entire region.
How it started
In October of 2013, Dale Hutchinson (Anthropology, UNC Chapel Hill) and Gwen Robbins Schug (in Anthropology at Appalachian State University at the time) created an interest group for faculty and students from across North and South Carolina who were working on topics related to human and non-human skeletal biology. The first meeting of the new Osteology in the Carolinas Interest Group (OCIG) was held on February 8, 2014 in the University Room at Hyde Hall on the Chapel Hill campus. Faculty and students were invited from UNC Chapel Hill, Duke, NC State, Appstate, East Carolina, UNC Wilmington, UNC Greensboro, High Point University, Western Carolina, Clemson, and University of South Carolina at Columbia. The first meeting had 12 presentations, more than 75 attendees, and a big celebration dinner for 25 guests that night at Top of the Hill. Attendees left feeling connected and supported in a way that we had not before and we vowed to make it an annual tradition.
An Evolving Tradition
Subsequent meetings have been held at UNC Greensboro (2015, 2017), East Carolina (2016), UNC Charlotte (2018, 2023), Western Carolina (2019, 2021), Appstate (2022), and the 10th anniversary meeting was held in Hyde Hall again at UNC Chapel HIll (2024). We plan for SEBIG 2025 to be held at UNC Greensboro in honor of Dr. Bob Anemone's imminent retirement and in 2026, it will be held for the first time at NC State Anthropology!
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The meeting has been held annually since 2014, without exception except for the greatest exception of all, 2020. The SEBIG meeting for 2020 was planned at UNC Greensboro. Dr. Bob Anemone and Gwen Robbins Schug (who was a visiting faculty member in UNCG Anthropology that year) were hosting and we had even planned a distillery tour at Fainting Goat Distillery for the first 40 people to sign up. Sadly, the conference was to be held March 28, 2020 and as you might imagine, it was cancelled on Wednesday, March 11, 2020 as the entire country ground to a halt and COVID-19 lockdown began for real (see below). COVID-19 also led to a virtual meeting in 2021 and a hybrid meeting in 2022!
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Each SEBIG meeting is followed by a business meeting, where we come to a consensus as to who will host the next year's event and twice, we also voted at the business meeting to change the name! In 2015, we changed the meeting name to Skeletal Biology in the Carolinas and in 2018, it was changed to its current form, SEBIG, following inspired by other regional meetings around the country (WEBIG, for example).
SEBIG 2020 Fell Victim to COVID-19 Lockdown and the March 28th Meeting was Canceled on March 11
An Exceptional Year
UNC Greensboro Anthropology and Biology are co-hosting the 2025 Meeting! Contact Bob Anemone or Gwen Robbins Schug for details.
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