Departmental News

Posted:  May 01, 2025 - 12:00pm

Laura Steele, PhD Candidate in the Archaeology subfield, has been awarded a Dumbarton Oaks Junior Fellowship in Pre-Columbian Studies. Dumbarton Oaks is a Harvard research institute, library, museum, and garden, located in Washington D.C., USA. Her fellowship was awarded for the academic year to support her dissertation research and will begin in September 2025.

Laura’s research addresses how Indigenous peoples on the margins of an empire actively navigated their dramatically changing world and sought to maintain their identity through foodways. Foodways– practices of food acquisition, preparation, and consumption—often play central roles in defining and signaling cultural identity. Case studies show that the persistence of human diets and cultural continuities in foodways in imperial contexts are closely associated with the persistence and/or affirmation of identity among Indigenous peoples, as they actively engage in accommodating their own interests to the new imperial order.

Food is among the most ubiquitous and sensitive ways in which families, communities, or ethnic groups materialize and reify their identities, and thus becomes one of the most appropriate materials to study when challenging ideas about imperial disruption among Indigenous peoples. Thus, Laura analyzes animal bone remains from Indigenous sites in what is known today as west-central Argentina. Although not immediately colonized, the people living at these sites had a long history of interaction and trade with Indigenous peoples to the north who were forcibly reorganized, enslaved, and killed following Spanish imperial expansion. Complementing the work done in the north, Laura and her colleagues examine how, over four centuries, the more mobile and more loosely organized Indigenous peoples of the south negotiated Spanish imperial expansion that began in the mid-16th century. Her research helps us to better address anthropological questions regarding social identity and the impact of imperial invasion that can be used for studies on other past or current Indigenous populations. Prior to the Dumbarton Oaks Junior Fellowship, Laura was awarded a Frank C. Hibben Recruitment Scholarship, a United States Fulbright Research Scholarship, and a Latin American Iberian Institute fellowship to support her research and collaboration with Argentine and United States scholars.