People in Archaeology

Margaret Conkey, Professor Emerita

Margaret Conkey seeks to understand the issues of gender and feminist perspectives in archaeology and in past human societies. She continues work on the intellectual history of how the corpus of images and artifacts loosely called "Paleolithic art" has been interpreted. Her field research project since 1993 is primarily focused on understanding the possibilities for open air archaeological evidence, especially of the late Paleolithic, in southern France, intended to contextualize the rich archaeological evidence of art and material culture found in the region's caves.

Junko Habu, Professor

Junko Habu's research focuses primarily on the study of prehistoric Jomon hunter-gatherers on the Japanese archipelago. She has tended to adopt an ecological framework with an emphasis on the study of subsistence and settlement, while not dismissing the importance of non-ecological factors such as historical contingency and human agency.

Christine Hastorf, Professor

Christine Hastorf focuses on social life, political change, agricultural production, foodways, and the methodologies that lead to a better understanding of the past through the study of plant-use. She has written on agricultural production, cooking practices and what shifts in these suggest about social relations, gender relations surrounding plant use, the rise of complex society, political change and the symbolic use of plants in the legitimation of authority, fuel use and related symbolism, and plant domestication as part of social identity construction and ritual and social identity. She is particularly interested in wild plant use as compared to domesticates, identifying the stages in plant processing, their participation in social construction, and especially their participation and reflection of the symbolic and the political, in addition to the playing out of the concept of culture in the natural world.

Rosemary Joyce, Professor

Rosemary Joyce's research is concerned with questions about the ways prehispanic inhabitants of Central America employed material things in actively negotiating their place in society. She is especially interested in the use of representational imagery to create and reinforce gendered identities, especially in Classic Maya monumental art and glyphic texts, and Formative period monumental and small-scale images. She specializes in the study of ceramics, including analysis of the functional implications of vessel distributions, and of the symbolism of representational pottery vessels and figurines, and also has conducted landscape-scale research on settlement patterns and more recently, senses of place.

Mio Katayama Owens, Visiting Lecturer

Archaeology of Japanese Jomon.

Patrick Kirch, Professor

Patrick Kirch is interested in the origins and diversification of the cultures and peoples of the Pacific, in the evolution of complex sociopolitical formations (especially "chiefdoms"), in prehistoric as well as ethnographic subsistence systems (especially those involving some form of intensification), and in the reciprocal interactions between indigenous peoples and the island ecosystems of the Pacific. He is engaged in inter-disciplinary collaboration with ecologists, soil scientists, paleobotanists, and quantitative modelers. A continuing focus has been on the Lapita Cultural Complex of the western Pacific, widely regarded as the "foundation" culture underlying the later diversity of island Melanesian and Polynesian cultures. A long-term field program in the Kahikinui district on the island of Maui focuses on protohistoric transformations in environmentally marginal landscapes. Another on-going project is an archaeological study of the remote Mangareva Archipelago in French Polynesia.

Kent G. Lightfoot, Professor

Kent Lightfoot's general research interests include North American prehistory, coastal hunter-gatherer societies, the emergence of early village communities, and culture contact between Native peoples and European explorers and colonists. His current work focuses on how indigenous peoples responded to European contact and colonialism, and how the outcomes of these encounters influenced cultural developments in postcolonial contexts. This involves the study of long-term culture change and persistence among coastal Native peoples that transcends prehistoric and historic boundaries. He is currently experimenting with an approach that incorporates a long-term diachronic perspective for comparing and contrasting the spatial organization of daily practices and cultural landscapes of coastal hunter-gatherer groups before, during, and after culture contact episodes.

Doris Maldonado, Visiting Lecturer

Participatory archaeology, Mesoamerica.

Steven Shackley, Professor Emeritus

Steve Shackley conducts research on hunter-gatherers and early
agriculturalists in the US Southwest and northern Mexico, using methods of
geoarchaeological science, especially stone geochemistry. Through his
NSF-supported lab, he collaborates with researchers interested in
analyzing obsidian and other lithic materials throughout the Americas. He
provides critical perspective on the application of archaeometry and the
false precision that it can produce, and encourages rigorous field
geoprospection to identify raw material sources integrating them into
socially relevant research.

Additional information is at: http://www.swxrflab.net

Kojun "Jun" Sunseri, Assistant Professor

Jun Sunseri's research focuses on the relationships between colonization and the transformation of indigenous landscapes, foodways, and identities. His work uses multiple, complementary lines of evidence of varied types and spatial scales, including analysis of archaeological faunal and ceramic assemblages related to domestic foodways, as well as GIS analysis of remote sensing, survey, and excavation data to recognize patterning of the tactical and engineered landscapes of the past. His field experiences include New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California, Mali, and South Africa.

Ruth Tringham, Professor Emerita

Ruth Tringham's research focus is the transformation of early agricultural (Neolithic) societies of Eastern Europe and Turkey, in particular the life-histories of buildings and the construction of place. Her recent practice of archaeology incorporates the utilization of digital, especially multimedia, technology in the presentation of the process of archaeological interpretation.

Laurie Wilkie, Professor

I am an anthropological archaeologist whose research has focused on understanding 19th- and 20th-century life in the United States and Caribbean, combining documentary and material sources of evidence to understand the recent past. Through a focus on household archaeology, my work has focused upon two principal themes: how expressions of social differenceâ€”gender, race, ethnicity, religion, sex, socioeconomics and politicsâ€”can be understood through the materiality of everyday life; and how a sense of material heritage has shaped human life in the recent past, and continues to do so today.

Alexander Baer, Graduate Student

Patrick Beauchesne, Graduate Student

Elliott Blair, Graduate Student

Eric Blind, Graduate Student

Anna Browne-Ribeiro, Graduate Student

John Chenoweth, Graduate Student

Katie Chiou, Graduate Student

Kimberly Christensen, Graduate Student

Robby Cuthrell, Graduate Student

Robert David, Graduate Student

Teresa Dujnic, Graduate Student

Donna Gillette, Graduate Student