I'm interested in maya archaeology and
i'm also interested in inequality
and how inequality emerges is
perpetuated
and whether and how it can be
ameliorated
i focus on community archaeology and i
try to do archaeology in a way that
facility facilitates marginalized groups
who want to tell their own stories and
benefit from their own culture and
history
i teach a seminar on space and power
which is looking at these two concepts
and how they overlap
and i'm also developing a seminar on
community archaeology
which fits very closely with what i do
in my research i co-direct
an archaeology project at the site of
punta laguna
in the yucatan peninsula of mexico we
are working collaboratively with a
contemporary group
of maya peoples to learn more about
ancient maya history and culture
and we're working in such a way so that
archaeology will benefit contemporary
maya groups
both in terms of learning more about
their own history and culture
and in terms of benefiting financially
from the lucrative tourism business
that surrounds ancient maya history and
culture in the greater cancun and tulum
area
i'm an archaeologist and i work on the
great plains i'm right now i'm working
on the period of time from about
80 1200 to about 80 1500 and looking at
major social changes in the farming
communities in
on the eastern part of the central
plains that probably produced the
arikara
and pawnee nations right now i'm
teaching us a
seminar on sort of archaeological
epistemology
how do we know the past at all from from
things
the fundamental problem in archaeology
is going from things to people
and it's not obvious it's not always
obvious how to do that i want
students to use all the issues that
we're talking about to construct their
own research
in june i'm going to be heading out to
northeastern nebraska
to excavate one of these enormous sites
that
that looks like a place that where we
have people and ideas coming together
from much of the central plains and much
of the
the northern part of the midwest the
indigenous north america was in this
immense period of
transition and social change and
massive population movements across much
of the continent um
and and they seem to have come together
in a big way in this little drainage in
northeastern nebraska
i'm doing now um analysis of ancient
materials
using spectrometry and
what i want to do is find ways to
trace the origin of those materials and
also how they were treated
and what is the meaning of them when
they are applied to
artwork for instance that artwork can be
a cave
or a card in a cave or it can be all all
campuses
in case of colonial paintings or
european painting
and i also teach disaster and culture
and in a way this
is um a class uh uh that focuses
in how anthropology
analyzes hazards
risk and vulnerability in
specific cases in which disasters
have affected or impacted societies so
what we have been doing in the last two
years is put together
a mobile laboratory so we can go to
um to museums or archaeological sites
with
primarily painting and analyze the
painting in situ
we are beginning to understand more
about
the technique of the painter and
we can ask larger questions about
the resources available for for a
specific time
time period for these artists
i'm a mesoamerican archaeologist and uh
my interests focus on the relationship
between religion and politics
in the pre-hispanic era and also
the human ecology of
pre-hispanic agriculture i teach a
number of graduate seminars
the seminar in archaeological theory i
teach co-teach with carla jones
bridging a seminar in materiality i've
been working
for some time on a long-term field
project
in southern mexico on the pacific coast
of oaxaca and it's a project looking at
the relationship between religion and
politics
during a period of political
centralization and then
and then collapse so looking at
questions of
the ways in which religious practice and
tradition constrains or enables
different political formations in a way
that that
it just doesn't get off the ground it
doesn't occur
i partner with contemporary pueblo
indian people to
investigate their ancestral villages and
connect the archaeological
record to their traditional knowledge in
song language place lore
and ceremony i teach a course on
archaeology in contemporary society
and i also teach the quantitative
methods course
offered in the department one of the
things i've been working on lately in my
field work
is trying to make sense of
all of the different kinds of
shrines and prayer locations that
pueblo people create through their
ritual practices the process of
documenting these places
really opens up an amazing window onto
other ways of thinking and being
the archaeology program is very much a
new world archaeology program
so we have uh three faculty that work in
mesoamerica
uh we have uh three that work in the
southwest
and then uh one that works in the great
plains
those those areas i would say are some
of the
represent some of the strongest programs
in those areas of archaeology
in the united states i really value how
open
my colleagues are to different uh
theoretical and methodological
approaches in the field
and i think that translates into
more interesting student research we
expect students to to be theoretically
sophisticated and current but they have
to also be interested in taking those
ideas down to the ground
in my experience there's a lot of
collaborative publication between
graduate students and faculty
we're very strong in the kinds of
research support that we have there's
lots of different
grant programs for field research and
our graduate students do well
we have a great track record with
getting nsf grants
with job placement after graduation and
it really is because of the people that
i think graduate students would want to
come here
