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Anthropology Department

Graduate Students

You can also check out what Anthro grad students are up to by visiting the Anthropology Graduate Collective at http://www.wm.edu/so/agsc/.

Autumn Barrett

• PhD student
• Entered 2001
• Autumn Barrett graduated with a B.A. in History and a B.S. in Psychology from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1997.  After working in public relations and government relations within the public and private sectors of Virginia, she entered William and Mary's M.A. / Ph.D. Program in Historical Anthropology.  Autumn's region of interest is the African Diaspora.  Her MA thesis, "Childhood, Colonialism and Nation-Building" (2004), investigates the role of childhood in the construction of race, class and gender in Virginia during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  Her research combines bio-cultural and socio-cultural perspectives to understand ideology and identity as powerful and intertwined social components through which people create and resist social inequity.  Currently, Autumn is a graduate research associate at the Institute for Historical Biology (www.wm.edu/anthropology/IHB).  This summer, she conducted pre-dissertation research on intersections between history, identity and the idea of race in the U.S. and Brazil as a Lewis and Clark Scholar of the American Philosophical Society.  Autumn's analysis focuses on representations of slavery and resistance in Virginia (U.S) and Rio de Janeiro (Brazil).

Stephanie Bergman

• MA student
• Entered 2007
• I like theory and dirt and anything in between.

Jason Boroughs

• PhD student
• Entered 2004

Brendan Burke

• MA student
• Entered 2003
• Brendan received his BA from Longwood University in 2003. A native of Virginia, Brendan's interests lie in the contact era of the Chesapeake. He entered the M.A. program in 2003 and has been working with the Werowocomoco Research Group during their summer field seasons ever since. Also working with the Chickahominy River Survey, Brendan has used data from this large project as a focus for his thesis. It is entitled In the Crucible of the Frontier: Analysis of Artifacts from a 1635-1670 Frontier Trading Post and looks at Anglo-Powhatan relationships along an early English colonial boundary. Brendan has also worked with graduate students Dan Sayers on the Great Dismal Swamp Landscape Study and Chuck Meide on the Achill Maritime Survey. He was recently successful in defending his thesis.

Jennifer Camp

• PhD student
• Entered 2006
• Jenny graduated from the University of Montana with a B.S. in Business Administration (2004), an M.B.A. (2005), and an M.A. in Anthropology (2006). Her research interests include: identity, race/ethnicity, class, and gender issues in historical archaeology; historic landscapes; and heritage and preservation. Her M.A. thesis, Community Dynamics and Social Status at the Brimstone Hill Fortress National Park, St. Kitts, West Indies, explored how social status and inequality within the context of a British military organization was observed in the archaeological record. Besides the Caribbean, her field experience includes two mining towns in western Montana. For her dissertation, Jenny will be exploring social, communication, and transportation networks associated with Alaskan aviation.

Sarah Chesney

• MA/PhD student
• Entered 2005

Angela Daniel

• PhD student
• Entered 2002

Rebecca Derosier

• MA student
• Entered 2005

Carl Carlson-Drexler

• PhD student
• Entered 2005
• I am a conflict archaeologist, doing dissertation research on southwest Arkansas during the Civil War. I hold a BA in anthropology from Grinnell College, Iowa, and a MA from the University of Nebraska. In addition to Arkansas, I have participated in research in New Mexico, the Yucatan Peninsula, Cuba, Virginia with the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Nebraska, Missouri, and the British Virgin Islands. My interests besides conflict lie in forensic archaeology, landscape studies, theory, ethnohistory, archaeogeophysics, and spatial analysis. For more information, go to http://www.projectpast.org/cdrexler
.

Josh Duncan

• MA student
• Entered 2004

Melissa Eaton

• PhD student
• Entered 2002
• Melissa Ann Eaton is a Ph.D. student (ABD) in the Historical Archaeology program. She graduated magna cum laude A.B. in Anthropology with honors in Anthropology (2000) and with an M.A. in Anthropology (2002) from the University of Missouri - Columbia. Her undergraduate thesis is entitled: Nationalism and Its Role in Language Revitalization. Her master's thesis, Regionality in State Cultural Resource Management Field Guidelines, comprehensively compared Phase I field guidelines issued by State Historic Preservation Offices in the United States and many of its territories. Her research interests include ethnohistory, documentary archaeology, notions of identity and ethnicity, and the historical archaeology of American Indians.
  Melissa's dissertation, Against the Grain: Culture Change, Revitalization,and Identity at Delaware Village, Southwest Missouri, 1821-1831,investigates an American Indian removal settlement. She is writing this dissertation with the support of Missouri State University and the MSU Center for Archaeological Research.

Theresa Fewlass

• PhD student
• Entered 2004

Meghan Habas-Siudzinski

• MA student
• Entered 2005
• Meghan Habas Siudzinski entered the Master's program in Historical Archaeology in the Fall of 2005. Her interests include comparative colonialism, comparative diasporas, identity, and heritage formation. Her field experience includes plantation and urban settings in the southeast and mid-Atlantic United States. During the summer of 2006, Meghan's work included conducting her thesis research in Ireland, working as a TA with Colonial Williamsburg's field school, and excavating a sugar plantation in the British Virgin Islands. Meghan plans to graduate in May of 2007.

Brian Heinsman

• MA program student
• Entered 2004

Meredith Holoday

• MA student
• Entered 2005
• Meredith Holaday is an MA student who entered the program in August of 2005 after graduating from the College of William and Mary with B.A. degrees in Anthropology and English. Meredith is interested in public archaeology and strategies to make archaeological research relevant and provocative to the general public. Her research interests include 17th- and 18th-century British colonial sites and Late Woodland and Colonial period Native American sites in Virginia. Meredith's MA thesis will compare teawares from the Bush Hill House in Barbados with collections from Colonial Williamsburg in order to address how tea rituals were used to define and negotiate social identity during the 18th century.

Natasha Jones

• MA student
• Entered 2005
• After receiving a BA in Anthropology and History from Salisbury University on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in May of 2005, Natasha Jones came to W&M in August of 2005 and is currently pursuing an MA in historical archaeology. Her research interests are influenced by a love for the Eastern Shore and a fascination with its history and past cultural landscape. Her thesis will focus on cross-cultural negotiations of identity and power during the germinal period of the area's colonial settlement in the second half of the seventeenth century. It is her hope that this work will serve to contribute to an improved understanding of colonial dynamics on Delmarva, to draw attention to its largely overlooked value as an area of research, and to provide a basis for regional comparisons in historical and anthropological scholarship.

Mark Kostro

• PhD student
• Entered 2002

Nate Lawrence

• MA student
• Entered 2004

Nadia Levine

• PhD student
• Entered 2004

Dessa Lightfoot

• PhD student
• Entered 2005
• Dessa Lightfoot received her B.A. in english and textual studies with a focus in Creative Writing and a minor in anthropology from Syracuse University in 2001. Dessa graduated with her M.A. in anthropology with a specialization in archaeology from the University of New Mexico in 2004. From 2004 to 2005 Dessa worked for the Archaeological and Historical Conservancy in Davie, FL. Dessa has been at the College of William and Mary since 2005, working on her PhD in historical archaeology with a focus on zooarchaeology and British Colonial foodways. Dessa is focusing on the relationship between printed cookery books and colonial foodways as one way to discuss culture continuity and change in colonial situations. Dessa has worked as a museum docent and educator at the South Florida Museum of Natural History in Dania Beach Fl; an emergency museum conservator for the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe, NM; a field technician, reports writer, and collections assistant for The Archaeological and Historical Conservancy in Davie, Fl; a teaching assistant for the Wren Garden Archaeological Field School for Colonial Williamsburg; and a historical interpreter for Jamestown Settlement. Dessa’s interests include foodways and food writing; faunal analysis of domestic animals; experimental archaeology; interpretations of daily life, archaeological theory with a specific focus on feminism, structuralism, semiotics, and economic and materialist theories of cuisine; public archaeology; and archaeological ethics.

Fred Lumb

• MA student
• Entered 2004

Shannon Mahoney

• PhD student
• Entered 2001
• Shannon Mahoney earned her Master's degree in 2004 after completing her thesis, entitled Pay for Labor: Socioeconomic Transitions of Freedpeople and the Archaeology of African American Life from 1863-1930. Her undergraduate work was completed at U.C. Santa Cruz in 1995, after which she worked in Cultural Resource Management for several years.
  In her dissertation work, Shannon will be examining community building among African American families on Virginia’s Lower Peninsula between 1862 and 1920 using multiple lines of evidence including oral histories with descendants, documents, and artifacts. Archaeological testing at Charles’ Corner, a post-bellum residential community on the Lower Virginia Peninsula, provides a compelling account of African American landholders during this critical period of cultural, social and economic transition. Her interests include bioarchaeology and the African Diaspora, the relationship between biology, society and culture, as well as community engagement and public education.

Chuck Meide

• PhD student
• Entered 2002
• Chuck Meide is from Atlantic Beach, Florida, and he received his undergraduate and master's degrees from Florida State University in 1993 and 2001.  While at FSU, Chuck participated in and directed a wide variety of maritime archaeological projects in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico, including the excavation of La Belle, the French explorer La Salle's ship lost in Texas in 1686.  As a William and Mary student, he has worked in Virginia (City Point and the Eastern Shore), Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, and has directed three seasons of fieldwork in Ireland for his dissertation research.  His dissertation is a study of economic relations as played out on the 19th century maritime landscape of Achill Island (Ireland's largest island, off the coast of Co. Mayo).  On Achill and in the surrounding Clew Bay area, he has recorded the remains of four historic shipwrecks along with a number of vernacular watercraft and the ruins of a Victorian-era commercial fishing station and ice house, a British Coastguard station, two stone boathouses, numerous ship anchors recovered from the sea, and other maritime sites.  The 2006 fieldwork was supported by a 5,000 euro grant from the Irish Heritage Council.  The project webpage, which features illustrated updates from the most recent season of fieldwork, can be viewed at http://www.maritimehistory.org/achill.html.
  
  In March of 2006, Chuck accepted the position of Director for the Lighthouse Archaeological Maritime Program (LAMP), the research arm of the St. Augustine Lighthouse and Museum.  Here in America's oldest port city (founded 42 years before Jamestown) he is in charge of a major maritime archaeological research and educational institute.  Since his arrival at LAMP, Chuck has hired a new staff archaeologist, overseen the purchase of a new research vessel, re-organized the LAMP offices, laboratory, and diving locker, and has secured over a quarter million dollars in grant support for a major program of archaeological fieldwork, archival research, analysis, and public outreach activities.  More information on LAMP is available at www.LAMPmaritime.org. 
  
  Chuck has presented numerous papers at regional, national, and international conferences, and has published two articles in the Society for Historical Archaeology's publication Underwater Archaeology.  Another article (co-authored with Katie Sikes) is currently under review for publication in the SHA journal Historical Archaeology, and one has been accepted for publication in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology pending a final phase of edits.

Derek Miller

• MA / PhD student
• Entered 2006
• Derek received his undergraduate degree in Anthropology and Archaeology from the University of Virginia. His past fieldwork includes working on historical sites in Benin, West Africa associated with the kingdoms of Hueda and Dahomey. His current research is on the Caribbean island of St. Eustatius where he is exploring the role of St. Eustatius in the larger Atlantic economy during the 17th and 18th centuries.

Kathleen Mocklin

• MA student
• Entered 2007
• Kathleen graduated with a B.A. in Anthropology from Louisiana State University in 2006. After graduating, she worked for the Louisiana State Historic Preservation Office from 2006-2007.
  Areas of interest: the Caribbean, Southern United States
  Past field work areas: Southeast Louisiana and Barbados
  Research Interests: Anthropology, Historical Archaeology, the African Diaspora, the Caribbean, family life, periods of resistance, childhood, maroon societies, oral histories, folklore, public outreach, community development, GIS

David Moran

• MA student
• Entered 2007
• Mr. Moran is hoping to contribute to the archaeology of the Tidewater region. One of his current notions is that some archaeology is better than none, and that counties in the area that advertise history should actually put more of us to work finding it. He is currently employed full time in the engineering field, where he creates plats and plans and lobbies for more archaeological reconnaissance, and is a part-time student in the Masters in Historical Archaeology Program. He has a B.A. in Anthropology from the University of Washington, Seattle.

Oliver Mueller-Heubach

• PhD student
• Entered 2003
• Oliver Mueller-Heubach graduated with honors from the University of Pittsburgh in spring 2003, having majored in Anthropology and History and with certificates in Western European Studies and German for Professional Purposes. His field school experiences include: Casa Malpais Anasazi Pueblo in Arizona, Talati de Dalt megalithic site on Menorca, Spain; Fröjel, a Viking- era port on Gotland, Sweden and the 18th- and 19th-century Moravian First House/ Schaffner Pottery in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. This last provided the background for an honor's thesis on Moravian pottery and kiln technology.
  
  Oliver's research interests include 18th- through 20th-century archaeological landscapes of English, Dutch and German-American communities. Further interests include archaeological illustration and material culture analysis. He has worked part-time for the William and Mary Center for Archaeological Research since 2004. Oliver successfully defended his MA thesis, Boat-Wrights in a Port of Black Diamonds: Waterfront Landscapes of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal's Cumberland, MD Terminus in May, 2006.

Kelsey Noack

• MA student
• Entered 2007
• Kelsey Noack moved to Virginia from Illinois in 2005 after completing her B.A. in Anthropology at Southern Illinois University Carbondale (SIUC), with a focus in Biological Anthropology. She entered the M.A. program for Historical Archaeology in Fall 2006, and is currently completing her thesis research in cooperation with the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation’s Department of Archaeological Research through the use of their faunal lab. Her thesis topic pertains to the role of wildlife and hunting in the elite diet and lifestyle in the mid-to-late eighteenth century in the Tidewater area. Her related interests include the cultural meaning of diet change and provisioning methods, political economy, colonial methodology, zooarchaeology and comparative colonial studies. She plans to continue graduate research in the future with a focus on French contact period archaeology in the Midwest. She is also interested in public education and interpretation, and has worked at several museums in the Williamsburg area within the field of public education as well developed a children’s archaeology curriculum for The Sun Foundation’s annual summer Arts & Sciences program in central Illinois.
  
  Her practical archaeological experience includes employment by the Illinois Transportation Archaeological Research Program, SIUC’s Center for Archaeological Investigations, and the James River Institute for Archaeology.

Jennifer Ogborne

• PhD student
• Entered 2002
• Jennifer graduated cum laude from Bowdoin College (2002) with majors in History and Art History/Archaeology. Her senior thesis was entitled The Burying Yard of York, Maine: A Study of 18th Century Non-Maine New England Gravestone Carvers. She received her M.A. from the College of William and Mary (2004) after completing her master's thesis, Chickahominy Stylistic Expression: Preliminary Motif Analysis of Ceramics of the Chickahominy River Drainage.
  
  Her research interests include "frontier" and peripheral contexts in North America, specifically in the Intermountain West of the 19th and early 20th centuries and northern New England and New York of the 17th and 18th centuries, applications of core/periphery dialectics and particularly the ecological Marxist approach advocated by John Bellamy Foster and Jason Moore, and provisioning and foodways studies using a world-systems approach. In addition, she is interested in late Roman and early Medieval Britain, colonial Chesapeake, gravestone studies and the Protohistoric Chesapeake and New England.
  Jennifer's dissertation focuses on a provisioning study of Coloma, Montana, a small and short lived (1893-1906) gold-mining boomtown in the Garnet range approximately 30 miles east of Missoula using the ecological Marxist approach to world-systems theory. The photo shows the site of her dissertation research.

Nancy Phaup

• PhD student
• Entered 2002

Joseph Roberts

• PhD student
• Entered 2005
• Joe received a BA from the University of Pennsylvania in Communications (1986), and an MA from Yale University in Social and Cultural Anthropology (1988). His research interests include semiotics, archaeological pragmatics, philosophical hermeneutics, social theory, philosophy of science, culture contact and creolization, ethnohistory, and public archaeology. After a fifteen-year career as a journalist and editor based in Austin, Texas, Joe Roberts' vision of the promise of public archaeology motivated his return to the academic life. His area interests span the Caribbean region and the Atlantic seaboard with a special interest in the archaeology and history of Colonial and Federal-era Philadelphia.

Maria Salamanca

• PhD student
• Entered 2002
• Maria F. Salamanca received a B.A. Anthropology from Universidad de Los Andes, Bogotá- Colombia (2000). Her thesis was entitled: Asentamientos tempranos en el valle de Sachica, Boyacá, Colombia. Her M.A. in Anthropology (2004) was received from the College of William and Mary, after successfully defending her thesis: St Eustatius and the Caribbean Trade System: A Study of Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Coins from the Caribbean. Her research interests focus on sixteenth-century Spanish colonialism in Latin America. She is also interested in looking at material culture and identity in cultural contexts, and how Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans responded to cultural contact in the New World, and in topics such as trade systems in the Caribbean and South America, early colonial settlements in the New World, and comparative colonialism. Maria's dissertation is entitled Anthropological Approaches to Colonial Identities at the Sixteenth-Century Spanish City of Nombre de Dios, Panama, funded by The Richard Maass Memorial Research Grant from The Manuscript Society (2005), as well as a grant from National Geographic. She will focus on social relations and their consequences through the analysis of material culture from the sixteenth-century port of Nombre de Dios, Panama. This city was one of the most important ports of the New World during the sixteenth century because it was the point of encounter for merchants from all around the world. A large percentage of the gold and silver extracted from South America passed throughout this port before its final destination, Spain.

Dan Sayers

• PhD student
• Entered 2001
• Daniel O. Sayers, 33, has worked in academic and CRM contexts throughout the country for over a decade. Sayers entered the Ph.D. program in its inaugural year, 2001 (ABD 2003), having received a B.A. (1995) in Philosophy and Anthropology and an M.A. (1999) in Anthropology/Historical Archaeology at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo.
  
  His research interests are varied and include: landscape political economy; ideology, propaganda, and social coercion; animal rights approaches to archaeology (which he has initialized steps toward); anthropologies of defiance; and Marxian existentialist approaches to alienation, exile and material culture. Since 2002, Dan has studied the political economy of space, defiance, and exilic alienation through his well-publicized dissertation work in the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia and North Carolina where he has begun analysis of sites associated with maroons, disenfranchised Native Americans, and enslaved canal company laborers (ca. 1630-1865).
  
  Dan has received several proposal-based grant awards throughout his career including a a multi-year award from the Canon National Park Service American Science Scholars Program. Sayers has authored and co-authored numerous articles that have appeared/will appear in, for example, International Journal of Historical Archaeology, Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, Transforming Anthropology, Michigan Archaeologist, and Western Journal of Black Studies.

Chris Shephard

• MA student
• Entered 2007
• Chris received a BA in History from Virginia Tech in 2002. Prior to entering the MA program at William and Mary, he worked for five years in cultural resource management. Chris’ interests include identity formation, socio-political change, settlement patterning and culture contact in the Middle Woodland through Contact period Chesapeake. His thesis research will examine sites identified by the William and Mary Center for Archaeological Research during a Phase I investigation of the 6,000 acre Yorktown Naval Weapon Station. An examination of this data in the context of previously identified sites and ethnohistorical data of the greater Tidewater will provide a deeper understanding of the social, economic, and ideological change that lead to the creation of the Powhatan chiefdom.

Kathryn Sikes

• PhD student
• Entered 2004
• Katie Sikes entered the Ph.D. Program in Historical Archaeology with an M.A. in Anthropology from Florida State University (2003), and a B.A. in Anthropology from Syracuse University (1996). She has previously worked for the National Park Service's Southeast Archeological Center as well as several cultural resource management firms. Her research interests include postcolonial theory, cognitive landscapes, the relationship between history and the construction of social identity, and maritime archaeology. An excerpt of her M.A. thesis, an historic preservation documentation of a 19th-century schooner, appeared in a 2004 edition of International Journal of Nautical Archaeology (33/2), and she has forthcoming publications in preparation or review including a study of 17th-century Chesapeake pipes decorated in the star motif, as well as two collaborative interpretations of the vernacular boats of 19th-century Achill Island, Ireland (coauthored with Chuck Meide).
  
  For the past two years, Katie has served as the site supervisor and principal teaching assistant for the College of William and Mary’s archaeological field school at the Ravenscroft Site in Colonial Williamsburg (visit the project website at http://research.history.org/RavensCroft/index.cfm?CFID=1048648&CFTOKEN=55475613). She is currently working on her dissertation, which focuses upon inter-ethnic encounters in colonial Virginia during the period from the 1630s to 1660s, with particular emphasis upon excavated artifact assemblages from City Point and the upper James River. She has been awarded an American Philosophical Society Lewis & Clark Field Scholarship to support this research.

Grace Turner

• PhD student
• Entered 2004
• Grace is originally from the Bahamas. Her research interests include maritime transportation networks, migration, and the impact of these factors on the African Diaspora.
  
  In 2004 she completed an MA in Nautical Archaeology at Texas A&M University. Her thesis, entitled Bahamian Ship Graffiti, documented ship graffiti from sites throughout the Bahamas and the Turks & Caicos Islands. This research also attempted to understand who were the graffiti artists. Her dissertation research will focus on a cemetery, in the Bahamas, for people of African descent that was in use from the late 18th to early 20th centuries. She will correlate bioarchaeological data with cultural material used for African-influenced grave treatment. The aim of this research is to understand ways in which African-influenced cultural beliefs and the broader political economy impacted the lives of Bahamians of African descent.

Buck Woodard

• MA/PhD student
• Entered 2005
• With a focus on Ceramics, Metals, and Art History, Buck Woodard graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University (1997) with a Bachelors Degree in Fine Arts. He completed additional coursework in Art Education with Old Dominion University, working towards Virginia K-12 teacher certification (2001).
  In addition to being an educator, Mr. Woodard has had a continuing commitment to civic programs - engaging in public discourse on at-risk populations, as a commissioner for the Commission on National and Community Service, and as an advocate for American Indians. As a descendant and enrolled member of the Lower Muskogee Creek, Mr. Woodard has served the Governor of Virginia as an "Indian at Large" on the Virginia Council on Indians. Working with tribal members from across the region, Mr. Woodard has been involved in numerous American Indian projects, including recent contributions to the National Museum of the American Indian, the National Park Service, the U.S. Department of Agriculture,New Line Cinema,and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
  Currently (2005), Mr. Woodard is a Ph.D. student in the Historical Anthropology Department at the College of William & Mary, where he works with the American Indian Resource Center. His current research interests include the Southern Iroquois, American Indians of the Eastern Woodlands, ethnic identities, and cultural adaptation.

Landon Yarrington

• MA / PhD student
• Entered 2007
• Landon Yarrington graduated summa cum laude from George Mason University with a BA in Anthropology in 2007. Landon's undergraduate career focused on socio-cultural anthropology and social theory, and he spent his summers working with archaeologists in Jamestown, China, Colonial Williamsburg, Fort Eustis, and Burnt Corn Pueblo, New Mexico. Most recently, he presented his research in New Mexico entitled, Oops! Pot Drops and Sherd Scatters in the Galisteo Basin during a poster session at the 2007 SAA conference.
  
  Landon entered the program pursuing how anthropology might learn more about culture-contact and comparative colonialism through the material record. Prospective research is leading him back to New Mexico to investigate slavery institutions and race issues in regards to the African Diaspora. Other active research interests are the political economies of maroon societies, the dialectic between art and tourist economies, and development and globalization.