Christina Carolus

Christina M. Carolus is a Ph.D student and anthropological archaeologist with interests in human-environmental interaction, paleoecology, paleoethnobotanical and zooarchaeological methods, foodways, identity, and cultural heritage issues. She holds a degree in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley. Christina’s field and laboratory work has been oriented primarily toward questions of human-environmental interaction and of the nature of plant remain data as potential indices of past social relations, social practices, and worldviews. Her previous research employed multiscalar analysis of plant remains to investigate dimensions of local environmental change, social and economic relationships, and landscape management at the Classic period Maya regional center of La Milpa, Belize. Most recently she has excavated and employed paleoethnobotanical regimes at the Classic period Maya site of Piedras Negras (Guatemala), several sites in the Northern Maya Lowlands of Yucatán (Mexico), and at early and mid-Holocene cave sites in the Southern Andes (Argentina). Beyond the laboratory and the field, she seeks to engage with and incorporate indigenous epistemologies and concerns, social theory (classical social, contemporary critical, gender, postcolonial), and various strands of philosophy. An important element of her practice as an archaeologist concerns critical engagement with the nature and role of archaeological research in contemporary Latin America; more broadly, it extends to questions of social, political, and economic impacts upon Latin American communities at various scales. This includes interests in heritage issues (e.g. tourism industries, archaeological links to globalization and development, museum ethics, identity formation, and the politics of site ownership, conservation, and protection) and confrontation of potential neocolonial aspects of archaeological practice.