Kristina Douglass was doing the dishes in her slippers when she received the call from the MacArthur Foundation, giving her the news that she had received a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship .

"I told them I was in my office," she recalls, "but really I was at the kitchen sink, looking as surprised and stunned as I felt. It was a very surreal moment."

Douglass, an archaeologist at Columbia University, received the $800,000 award for her research "investigating how past human societies and environments co-evolved and adapted to climate variability."

To explore this question, she conducts much of her fieldwork in southwest Madagascar, "a place where the coral reef, very clear blue waters, meet a dry desert vegetation scape," she says. "It's the most amazing landscape I've ever been i

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