Contributors
Sarah B. Barber is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Central Florida. She received her PhD at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her current research focuses on the role of religion and long-distance exchange on the development of complex societies in Oaxaca.
Joanne Baron received her PhD in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania and now teaches at the same institution. Her research investigates political relationships among the Classic Maya through archaeology and epigraphy. She has worked on archaeological projects in Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras and is the director, with Liliana Padilla, of the La Florida Archaeology Project in Guatemala.
Christopher S. Beekman received his PhD from Vanderbilt University in 1996. He is an associate professor at the University of Colorado Denver. His research interests include political systems and practices and social identity, particularly as revealed through research in western Mexico.
Jeffrey Brzezinski completed his MA in anthropology at the University of Central Florida in 2011. He is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Colorado Boulder. His research interests include the rise of complex societies in Mesoamerica, the negotiation of political authority during the Formative Period, and the role of religion in pre-Columbian political formations.
Bryce Davenport received his MA in anthropology at Brandeis University, where he is currently a doctoral student. He serves as a geospatial analyst for Cultural Site Research and Management, an archaeology and heritage management research group, where he coordinates several ongoing remote sensing projects in cooperation with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and Johns Hopkins University. He maintains an active interest in premodern systems of exchange, the political economy of highland Mexico, and the integration of remote sensing technologies into archaeological investigation.
Charles Golden received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. He is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology and Chair of the Latin American and Latino Studies Program at Brandeis University. He has worked in the Usumacinta River region since 1997, most recently as codirector of the Sierra del Lacandón Regional Archaeology Project in Petén, Guatemala, and the Proyecto Arqueológico Busilja-Chocolja in Chiapas, Mexico. His research interests concern the dynamic social and political boundaries between Maya kingdoms, human-environmental dynamics, and the cultural significance of temporal boundaries, history, and social memory for the ancient Maya.
Takeshi Inomata is a professor and Agnese Nelms Haury Chair at the School of Anthropology, University of Arizona. He earned a PhD from Vanderbilt University. Through the excavation of Aguateca and Ceibal, Guatemala, he has been examining social change, political organization, warfare, and households in Maya society.
Arthur A. Joyce earned his PhD from Rutgers University in 1991 and is a professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado Boulder. Since 1986 he has conducted interdisciplinary research in Oaxaca on issues of political dynamics, ideology, landscape, and ecology. He is author of Mixtecs, Zapotecs, and Chatinos: Ancient Peoples of Southern Mexico (2010) and editor of Polity and Ecology in Formative Period Coastal Oaxaca (2013).
Sarah Kurnick earned her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently a chancellor’s postdoctoral fellow in the department of anthropology at the University of Colorado Boulder and codirector of the Punta Laguna Archaeology Project. Her primary interests include the role of the past in shaping the political present and how archaeology can benefit the public and foster social change.
Carlo J. Lucido is an MA student at the University of Central Florida. He has conducted archaeological excavations in Florida with the Tribal Historic Preservation Office of the Florida Seminole and in Mexico with the Proyecto Río Verde. His work in Oaxaca began in 2009, where he has excavated the acropolis at Rio Viejo. His research interests include trade, politics, and identity. His current research focuses on feasting and the use of monumental spaces during early political centralization in coastal Oaxaca, Mexico.
Simon Martin received his PhD from University College London and is currently an associate curator at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. His research focuses on the political structure and interactions of the Classic Maya, and he has conducted fieldwork at Calakmul, Campeche, Mexico, for over twenty years.
Tatsuya Murakami received his PhD from Arizona State University and is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Tulane University. His research focuses on the materiality of sociopolitical processes in central Mexico and uses practice-based and multidisciplinary approaches, including archaeometric methods. He codirects an archaeological project with Shigeru Kabata (Universidad de las Américas Puebla) at the Formative site of Tlalancaleca, Puebla, Mexico, investigating regional processes that led to the formation of the Teotihuacan state.
Helen Perlstein Pollard received her PhD from Columbia University in 1972. She is now professor emerita at Michigan State University, where she has worked since 1986. She has carried out extensive archaeological and ethnohistoric research in central and west Mexico since 1970, with a particular focus on Michoacan and the Tarascan empire. She is currently writing two monographs that will synthesize archaeological understandings of the emergence of Tarascan civilization for archaeologists and the general public.
Víctor Salazar Chávez studied at the Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potosí, Mexico, where he earned a degree in archaeology in 2013. He is currently a doctoral student at George Washington University. His research interests are in the study of subsistence systems in the Early Formative Period in Mesoamerica, using zooarchaeological and paleobotanical evidence.