UC Santa Cruz - Anthropology - Graduate Program - Anthropological Archaeology Track

Anthropological Archaeology Track

The Doctoral Program in Anthropological Archaeology

The doctoral program in anthropological archaeology is highly selective, focusing on the archaeology of late precolonial societies in East and West Africa and North America, especially the Southwest and California. The program also features a major emerging concentration on the archaeology of colonial encounters among peoples of Europe, Africa, and the Americas, supported by recent and scheduled faculty hires.

The program’s focus on the archaeology of colonialism is augmented by departmental strengths in the cultural anthropology of colonial encounters and is further enriched by interdisciplinary relationships with faculty in History, Latino and Latin American Studies, and History of Art and Visual Culture.



	Bas-relief from the royal palace at Abomey in Bénin depicting a Dahomean soldier carrying off a captive of war. Credit: J. Cameron Monroe

UC Santa Cruz’s archaeology graduate program is distinctive in insisting that theories of power, production and exchange, human ecology, gender, ethnicity, and technological practice be explored through rigorous laboratory and field research methods.

Doctoral students choose methodological concentrations in any of the following: ceramic materials analysis, landscape and architectural analysis, zooarchaeology, and chemical and isotopic characterization studies, singly or in combination. They work closely with faculty as apprentices in state-of-the-art research laboratories learning and applying advanced materials and spatial analysis techniques to address significant social, historical and ecological problems.

Current graduate student projects include:

using GIS and foodways to explore identity at landscape and household levels in an ethnically diverse buffer community in colonial New Mexico
applying technological analysis to California Mission Ware pottery to chart the emergence of diverse communities of practice during a span of rapid cultural change
agent-based modeling of aboriginal social boundaries and exchange in the late Holocene Monterey Bay region
reconstruction of historical ecology and human fisheries strategies over eight millennia in the Monterey Bay area

Santa Cruz Anthropology doctoral students are strongly supported to apply for extramural funding and consistently rank among the top departments on the campus for such support. Extramural funding won by archaeology PhD. students alone over the last five years includes:

National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship
National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement Grant
Wenner-Gren Foundation Pre-doctoral Research Grant
Jacob Javits Graduate Fellowship
UC-MEXUS Research Grant
Joe Ben Wheat Research Fellowship
Clogg Fellow, University of Michigan Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Research, Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research
Center for Spatially Integrated Social Sciences, UC Santa Barbara Scholarship

Archaeology graduate students have also successfully won numerous intramural fellowships and research funding.

UC Santa Cruz is renowned for its undergraduate teaching, and supervised development of graduate student skills in teaching is an integral part of the program.

The Faculty

The core faculty of the archaeology program are Diane Gifford-Gonzalez, Judith Habicht-Mauche, J. Cameron Monroe, and Adjunct Professor William Hildebrandt. A fourth tenure-track position, focused on the archaeology of the colonial encounter in the Americas, is scheduled to be added within the next few years, further strengthening the historic arm of our doctoral program. Two scientists specializing in isotopic characterization, A. Russell Flegal and Paul Koch, are affiliated faculty.

Doctoral students are encouraged to develop links not only with affiliated faculty in our department but also those in other departments on the campus. Currently, UCSC Faculty in History, Economics, Statistics and Applied Mathematics, and Earth Sciences serve on graduate student committees in the archaeology doctoral program.



	Credit: Diane Gifford-Gonzalez

The Graduate Curriculum

The normal course of progress in the doctoral program in anthropology involves up to three years of increasingly specialized study before the PhD. Qualifying Examination, a field or lab based research project of variable length, and a year of dissertation writing. Students entering with Masters degrees may progress through the program more swiftly, depending upon the fit of prior work with the requirements of the doctoral program.

First-year students take a foundational course in the history of archaeological theory, another elective theory course, and pass a portfolio review of their year’s work. They also participate in the departmental colloquia and proseminars, work closely with their faculty advisor to define methodological and regional foci of their curriculum, and to begin to develop their dissertation prospectus.

Within the first two years of study students will also take:

two foundational materials/methods courses in anthropology or laboratory courses in other departments
two advanced lab apprenticeship courses in anthropology or similar courses in other departments
two foundational courses in geographic/temporal areas
two graduate seminars in anthropology or related area of study
one quantitative methods course
two terms of supervised teaching experience.

The Third Year requirements are:

three laboratory apprenticeship courses or their equivalents
grant writing seminar
tutorials to prepare three Field Statements and a Research Prospectus for the PhD. Qualifying Exams
pass the PhD. Qualifying Exam by end of academic year
All courses outside the department must be approved by the graduate advisor.



	Photomicrograph of ceramic thin section showing mixed lithic sand temper. Credit: Judith Habicht-Mauche

After advancing to candidacy, Ph.D. students carry out a sustained laboratory or fieldwork project of variable length and are expected to complete their dissertations within a year of finishing this research.

For full details of degree requirements, and other aspects of the anthropology graduate program, please see the Anthropology Graduate Handbook.