Dr. Amy Thompson presented her talk Land Tenure, House Size, and Wealth Inequality of the Classic Lowland Maya as part of the Spring 2021 Anthropology Colloquia Speaker Series on Friday, February 26 at 10 am.  

Dr. Amy E. Thompson is an anthropological archaeologist whose research evaluates inequality and human-environment interactions among the Classic Maya (250-900 CE) through settlement patterns, spatial modeling, and household archaeology. For over a decade she has conducted research in southern Belize working alongside indigenous Mopan Maya communities. Her work relies heavily on geospatial methods, including GIS and lidar, and multi-proxy chronology building to understand household decision-making and inherited inequality through a lens of Human Behavioral Ecology. Dr. Thompson is first author on three peer-reviewed articles, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, and Remote Sensing; co-authored five additional peer-reviewed articles; and authored several conference proceeding chapters. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Explorer’s Club, the University of New Mexico, and the Copan Maya Foundation.

Dr. Thompson earned in BA in Anthropology from the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities in 2009. She earned her MS in 2011 and PhD in 2019, both from the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico. She is currently a Bass Postdoctoral Fellow at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Illinois and will begin on campus as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Texas at Austin in Fall 2021.

Hosted by the Department of Anthropology, the Alfonso Ortiz Center for Intercultural Studies, and the Latin American and Iberian Institute (LAII) the Department Colloquia Speaker Series will be held virtually via Zoom on Fridays at 10 am, and will be made available on our You Tube account following the event.  Upcoming speakers include (more details forthcoming): 

March 5                Luisa Maffi (Terralingua)

March 12             Pilar File-Muriel (UNM) and Chelsey Dyer (Vanderbilt University)

March 26             Katherine Starkweather (University of Illinois, Chicago)

April 2                   Jonathan Dombrosky (UNM)

April 9                   Osbjorn Pearson (UNM)

April 16                Jada Benn Torres (Vanderbilt University)

April 23                Nicholas Emlen (University of Tübingen)

April 30                 Suzanne Gaskins (Northeastern Illinois)

May 7                    Zwedi Tsegai (Max Planck Institute)