Professor, American Indian Studies | Professor, American Indian Studies-GIDP | Member of the Graduate Faculty | Curator, Archaeology | Regents Professor | Professor, Anthropology
I am an anthropological archaeologist with broad interests in archaeological method and theory, especially but not exclusively) as applied to the North American Southwest. My work has focused on ceramic analysis as a tool for understanding production, distribution, and consumption but more broadly is my interest in material culture to understand social relations in the past. My research on ceramic technology, craft specialization, and accumulations research led to a series of papers and edited volumes on social inequality, identity, feasting, and migration. These interests were fostered by more than a decade of work in the Silver Creek area of east-central Arizona, including a multi-year collaborative project with the White Mountain Apache Tribe. I also have field and research experience in a number of other areas of the Southwest including Zuni, Chaco, Mimbres, Grasshopper, and most recently the Greater Hohokam area. Outside the U.S. I have research experience in Guatemala Postclassic Maya) Kazakhstan Bronze Age) and Turkey Neolithic) Besides ceramics I am interested in depositional practice, and how that can be used to understand memory, materiality, and relational logics. Currently I am a PI on the Southwest Social Networks Project, which brings together data and a talented grouof scholars to apply social network analysis SNA) to archaeological data to the Southwest. This ongoing project continues my interest in looking at the dynamics of social relations from a multiscalar perspective.
Barbara Mills, an anthropological archaeologist from the School of Anthropology, has been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to investigate how people negotiate identities following migration through the study of corrugated ceramics in the Mogollon Region of the U.S. Southwest.
Key Aspects of the Grant:
* Barbara Mills and her team will examine how multicultural communities interacted and formed identities after a large migration by studying corrugated ceramics, or hand-built vessels with exposed coils.
* They will look at vessels and archives from six archaeological sites before and after the migration to identify communities of potters and understand how potters who migrated into new areas integrated (or not) into their new community.
* The project aims to contribute knowledge about how social dynamics were navigated in the past and provide insights for comparative case studies around the globe.
* The grant funds an undergraduate research assistant to gain experience in archaeological research by doing archival and museum collections work.