Departmental News

Posted:  Apr 30, 2025 - 12:00pm

Dr. Mary Stiner, distinguished alumna (UNM PhD, 1990), has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences.  

Dr. Stiner is Regents' Professor of Anthropology in the School of Anthropology, University of Arizona, Tucson. She is also Curator of Zooarchaeology at the Arizona State Museum. She conducts archaeological research on human ancestors, paleoeconomics, and social evolution. She earned B.A. and B.F.A. degrees in Anthropology and Fine Arts, respectively, in 1980 from the University of Delaware. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of New Mexico in 1990. She has conducted archaeological fieldwork at Paleolithic sites in Italy, Israel, Greece, Turkey, Portugal, France, and Morocco, and sites of diverse ages in the United States. Her professional interests include co-evolutionary processes involving Paleolithic humans, forager economics and technology, Paleolithic decorative traditions, the forager-farmer transition, population ecology, behavioral ecology, zooarchaeology of vertebrates and mollusks, and taphonomy and bone diagenesis. A recent focus is the co-evolutionary basis of animal domestication. Awards over the years include the first Society of American Archaeology book prize in 1996 for Honor among Thieves: A Zooarchaeological Study of Neanderthal Ecology (1994, Princeton University Press). She held a Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professorship at University College London in 2010. She became a UA Regents' Professor in 2014. She was awarded the Fryxell prize for her interdisciplinary scientific work by the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) in 2021.

In a 2020 science-wide citation survey, Stiner ranked in the top 1% in archaeology (Ioannidis et al (2020) PLoS Biol 18(10) (https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000918).

Stiner is also a visual artist (https://maryc-stiner-ndaa.squarespace.com/).