People in Archaeology


Margaret Conkey, Professor
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, Associate 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.
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.
Steven Shackley, Professor
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

Ruth Tringham, Professor of Anthropology

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 of Anthropology
Alexander Baer, Graduate Student, 2006
Patrick Beauchesne, Graduate Student, 2005
Elliott Blair, Graduate Student, 2008
Eric Blind, Graduate Student, 2006
Anna Browne-Ribeiro, Graduate Student, 2005
John Chenoweth, Graduate Student, 2006
Chih-Hua Chiang, Graduate Student, 2000
Katie Chiou, Graduate Student, 2008
Kimberly Christensen, Graduate Student, 2004
David Cohen, Graduate Student, 1999
Robby Cuthrell, Graduate Student, 2005
Robert David, Graduate Student, 2006
Teresa Dujnic, Graduate Student, 2005
James Flexner, Graduate Student, 2005
Timothy Gill, Graduate Student, 2001
Donna Gillette, Graduate Student, 2002
Rachel Giraudo, Graduate Student, 2003
Esteban Gomez, Graduate Student, 2001
Sara Gonzalez, Graduate Student, 2002
Andrew Griffin, Graduate Student, 2006
Anna Harkey, Graduate Student, 2006
Celeste Henrickson, Graduate Student, 2004
Jerry Howard, Graduate Student, 2007
Di Hu, Graduate Student, 2007
Alexandra Jones, Graduate Student, 2003
Kari Jones, Graduate Student, 2000
Mio Katayama, Graduate Student, 1999
Heather Law, Graduate Student, 2008
Ashley Lipps, Graduate Student, 2007
Doris Maldonado, Graduate Student, 2002
Ora Marek, Graduate Student, 2004
John Matsunaga, Graduate Student, 2000
Darren Modzelewski, Graduate Student, 2003
Theresa Molino, Graduate Student, 2006
Shanti Morell-Hart, Graduate Student, 2002
Colleen Morgan, Graduate Student, 2005
Brandon Nida, Graduate Student, 2007
Andrew Roddick, Graduate Student, 2002
Matthew Russell, Graduate Student, 2005
John Sapienza, Graduate Student, 2008
Matthew Sayre, Graduate Student, 2001
Tsim Schneider, Graduate Student, 2003
Liz Soluri, Graduate Student, 2003
Julie Wesp, Graduate Student, 2008