Archaeology

Archaeology is the study of past life ways through the analysis of material remains. The archaeology program at Purdue specializes in Old and New World archaeology with active faculty field research conducted in Mexico, Peru, Alaska, Armenia, and the Nile Valley. We provide training in a variety of specializations and bring these to the field through method and theory pertaining to settlement analysis, archaeometry (especially provenance analysis), archaeometallurgy, ceramic analysis and bioarchaeology. Problem areas addressed in faculty research include gender and class, social complexity in middle-range societies, early state formation, urbanism, culture contact in complex societies, identity, and health and disease.

The archaeology faculty is committed to student involvement in their research programs. Dr. Buzon directs a bioarchaeological research project ( Dr. Buzon's webpage) at the Nubian and Egyptian site of Tombos in Sudan. Student participation includes activities involving the excavation and analysis of human skeletal remains from this site. Dr. Cooper is currently expanding on earlier research into the use of metals by the Native people of northwestern North America ( Dr. Cooper's webpage) and is planning additional fieldwork in Alaska. He welcomes inquires from students interested in archaeometallurgy and/or Alaskan fieldwork. Dr. Lindsay's excavations currently focus on the lower town of a Late Bronze Age fortress in northwestern Armenia ( Dr. Lindsay's webpage), where he's examining how local communities responded to political and economic change during the mid-2nd millennium BC. He also encourages interested and enthusiastic students to inquire about opportunities for fieldwork and analysis. Dr. Otárola-Castillo is an evolutionary and computational anthropologist and a biostatistician (Dr. Otárola-Castillo's webpage) . His research program focuses broadly on the question: “What do people eat and why?” To answer this question, he develops quantitative tools to investigate the diversity, ecology, evolution, and co-evolution of human behavioral phenotypes in prehistoric and modern populations.

Applications for our M.S./Ph.D. programs are encouraged and interested students are invited to contact a faculty member or the anthropology graduate secretary, mailto:anthgrad@purdue.edu or (765)-496-7428 for more information about our program.