Graduate students in the lab supervise our two archaeological field schools and apprentice in ongoing research, while developing independent research projects on topics in North and South American archaeology. Research and publications of the lab and collaborators include systematic archaeological survey, settlement pattern analysis, household and mortuary archaeology, architectural analysis and reconstruction, paleoclimatology and agrarian archaeology and ethnoarchaeology, ceramic, textile, and lithic analysis and sourcing, paleoethnobotany and faunal analysis, and paleodemographic, paleodiet, aDNA, and life history approaches in bioarchaeology. The UCSD South American Archaeology Laboratory is dedicated to multidisciplinary archaeological field and laboratory research on Native American cultures and societies. There are five major archaeological laboratories linked to the Department of Anthropology at UC San Diego. We also have a strong methodological focus on environmental archaeology and paleoclimatic and isotopic studies through our deep connections with Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Our theoretical interests include but are not limited to the origins of the state and cities hunter-gatherers and subsistence resource exploitation the organization of exchange the impacts of long-distance, cross-cultural interaction diasporas and colonization social vulnerability and resilience human ecology climate and culture change and coastal and marine archaeology and Biblical archaeology.

Geographical interests of the current faculty include China, the Middle East (Israel, the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Cyprus), Mesoamerica (Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Hionduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, Andean South America (Peru and Chile), Puerto Rico and the Caribbean, Greece, and Southern California. Archaeology is transdisciplinary at its core, and the combined faculty research interests and approaches emphasize this. By taking a comparative worldwide view of the rise, maintenance, and collapse of ancient complex social organizations, and by trying to understand these processes in the various environmental contexts in which they took place, we seek to present a theoretically integrated curriculum in the fields of archaeology and prehistory. The Department of Anthropology offers an Anthropological Archaeology program specializing in complex societies and the environment.

Data analysis programs archaeology