Barbara Mills

Michigan State University Campus Visit

March 26th – 27th, 2020

Barbara J. Mills is Regents Professor of Anthropology at the University of Arizona, where she also holds appointments as Curator of Archaeology in the Arizona State Museum and member of the American Indian Studies Graduate Interdisciplinary Program. Her March 26th-27th visit to MSU is made possible by the Alumni and Friends Fund for Archaeology. Dr. Mills will be visiting with faculty and students, and she will present a public lecture on the 26th and a department talk on the 27th.

Barbara Mills

Regents’ Professor of Anthropology, School of Anthropology, University of Arizona

Barbara J. Mills is Regents Professor of Anthropology at the University of Arizona, where she also holds appointments as Curator of Archaeology in the Arizona State Museum and member of the American Indian Studies Graduate Interdisciplinary Program. She received her A.B. in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania, and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in anthropology from the University of New Mexico. She has conducted field and laboratory work in several areas of the U.S. Southwest, including the Four Corners, Chaco, Zuni, Mimbres, and Mogollon Rim areas. In addition, Professor Mills has conducted archaeological research in Guatemala (Postclassic), Kazahkstan (Bronze Age), and Turkey (Neolithic). She directed a long-term field project in the Mogollon Rim area, Arizona, in collaboration with the White Mountain Apache Tribe and the U.S. Forest Service. More recently she has collaborated on several National Science Foundation funded projects to construct large-scale synthetic databases and apply social network analysis to archaeological data from the U.S. Southwest and Northwest Mexico. This ongoing project continues her interests in looking at the dynamics of social relations from a multiscalar perspective to address migration, identity, and ideology in the past. She is the author or editor of nine books and over 90 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. Professor Mills is the recipient of the Society for American Archaeology’s Excellence in Archaeological Analysis Award for her ceramics research, the Gordon Willey Award for best archaeological paper in American Anthropologist, and was selected as the Patty Jo Watson Distinguished Lecturer by the Archaeology Division of the American Anthropological Association.

4th Annual MSU Archaeology Alumni & Friends Distinguished Lecture

Are We Living in the Age of Migration? A Deep-time Perspective from Southwest Archaeology on Past, Present, and Future Population Movements

Thursday, March 26th – 5:30pm-6:30pm
International Center, room 115
Light refreshments will be served. 

It is common to hear that we are living in an age of unprecedented migration. While there is no question that the number of people on the move is at an all-time high, migration scholars point out that many past population movements encompassed a higher proportion of their total population size than present-day examples. The study of migration histories through archaeology is one way to understand the scale and impact of long-term movement. In this talk I will focus on one of the most well-documented periods of population displacement in the U.S. Southwest. Between AD 1200 to the arrival of the Spanish in the mid-sixteenth century, archaeologists working in the Southwest have identified multiple large-scale migrations or diasporas, including the complete depopulation of the Four Corners and many other subareas. I provide an overview of this movement, the diversity of causes, and what made for successful migration such as the extent of their prior social networks, technological skills, and the creation of new social and religious institutions. I will argue that by looking at the causes and consequences of past migrations we are better poised to understand present and future migrations.

MSU Department Talk

The Roots of Urbanism in the U.S. Southwest: How Migration, Coalescence, and Inequality Created the Chaco World

Friday, March 27th – 3:00pm-4:30pm
McDonel Hall, room C103

Between AD 800 and 1200, Pueblo people created dense clusters of settlements representing what are among the earliest examples of urban landscapes in the U.S. Southwest. The first was centered on Chaco Canyon and quickly became the location of a hierarchically organized society that actively used principles of cooperation to construct monumental buildings for residence and community-based ritual. The second was centered in the Middle San Juan area, within a few day’s walk from Chaco Canyon. Hundreds of other smaller community centers were built throughout the region, which archaeologists working in the area refer to as the Chaco World, covering an area of over 100,000 sq km. Archaeologists have debated how these centers emerged, their relative timing, and their degree of connectivity. To address these questions, the Chaco Social Networks Project has compiled data on all known community centers with monumental architecture in the region, including 467 sites with great houses and/or great kivas. We applied the first systematic, region-wide ceramic dating to these sites to divide the sequence into 50-year intervals and then used social network analysis to address questions about migration, coalescence, and connectivity. Our results demonstrate how the process of urbanism is closely tied to migration, coalescence, and inequality. It also illustrates the value of social network analysis in understanding this process when coupled with well-dated regional settlement histories.

Sponsored By

The MSU Archaeology Alumni & Friends Distinguished Lecture is made possible by the Alumni and Friends Expendable Fund for Archaeology

Headshot Photo by Steve Zhao