THE DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY PRESENTS: "Getting from the Pleistocene to the Present in the American Southeast: What Is and What Still Could Be," a guest lecture by Dr. Shane Miller, Mississippi State University.

Archaeology in North America is an inherently odd discipline where most of the research into the Native past has been conducted by white, western researchers focused on a fairly insular and narrow set of questions. In this talk, I candidly discuss how my own experiences living in the American Southeast have caused me to critically evaluate my own research, and begin to try to break out of this mold by pivoting to environmental justice issues. In particular, I’ll focus on what the archaeological record can tell us about some possible paths for mitigating the kinds of natural disasters that are becoming increasingly common and costly in the region: hurricanes, floods, and forest fires.

Shane Miller is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures at Mississippi State University. His primary research interests are the Ice Age colonization of the Americas, the origins of agriculture in eastern North America, and how we can use lithic technology, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and geoarchaeology to make inferences about past human behavior.