Personnel

Prof. Geoffrey E. Braswell, Director View CV

Braswell has been a Mesoamerican archaeologist for more than 20 years. He was graduated from Tulane University with a Ph.D. in anthropology and has taught at UCSD, SUNY-Buffalo, the Universidad Autonoma de Yucatan, and the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala. He has worked at well-known archaeological sites such as Teotihuacan, Copan, Kaminaljuyu, Chichen Itza, Pusilha, Lubaantun, Calakmul, and numerous ancient settlements in highland Guatemala. Braswell’s research interests include the emergence of market economies in Mesoamerica, state formation processes, interaction between Central Mexico and the Maya, and the relationship between political and economic structures in the ancient world. He has also written extensively about obsidian, a volcanic glass widely used to stone tools, the ethnohistory of the highland Maya, identity theory, the archaeology of Nicaragua, and archaeometry. Follow links to Braswell’s curriculum vitae and publications.

Kiri L. Hagerman

I am a first year student working towards my PhD in Mesoamerican archaeology. My undergraduate background was in Egyptology and Middle Eastern archaeology, and I am now working in the Maya region in Mesoamerica. I have excavated at Chichen Itza in Mexico and will be doing my Master's research in Belize. I am interested in complex societies; particularly political economy, social stratification, and household archaeology.

Lauren D. Hahn

A graduate of Texas State University, Lauren is a second-year student in the Mesoamerican Archaeology lab. Her M.A. thesis is on the topic of site walls in the northern Maya lowlands, and specifically she discusses recent excavations at the site of Chichen Itza. Her main interests are economic networks and interaction, lithic production and exchange, warfare and defensibility, and the development of complex political and economic systems. Other interests include population displacement and migration, the Olmec culture, and cenote exploration.

Nancy Peniche May

I am a Mexican archaeologist interested in the Maya Area. Currently, I am focused on social complexity—mainly chiefdoms—during the Preclassic period, especially in the northern Maya lowlands. I am also interested in economic organization, lithics, household archaeology, and gender.

Karen N. Nickels

Kara's interests include both human impact on the environment and human response to environmental change in the Maya region. Since 2008, she has been working at the Preclassic site of El Mirador, focusing on unintentional changes in sedimentation resulting from intentional changes to the landscape and the effects that this had on the agricultural potential of the region.

Megan R. Pitcavage More Info

I’m a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at UCSD with a focus on the archaeology of the ancient Maya. My proposed dissertation research project will investigate production and consumption of ceramic goods at Nim Li Punit, Belize. I’m also interested in social differentiation as enacted in mortuary practices, osteology, and paleopathology. My archaeological research experience includes excavations in northern California, Belize, Guatemala, and Yucatán, Mexico.

Misha Miller-Sisson

I am an archaeologist working in the Maya area and am interested in the relationship between environment, space and culture, and how they influence and shape each other, as well as the embedded communicative structures in architecture. I have worked at sites in Belize and the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico.

Beniamino P. Volta

I'm a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at UCSD. My dissertation research looks at ancient Maya urbanism from a comparative perspective. I'm also interested in settlement pattern studies, landscape archaeology, Maya ethnohistory, complexity science, and all kinds of other fun stuff. I've done fieldwork at various sites in Mexico, Belize, and Jordan.

Graduates & Associated Scholars

• Sonja Schwake
• Christian M. Prager
• Cassandra R. Bill