Stephen W. Silliman

Stephen W. Silliman

University of Massachusetts Boston
Department of Anthropology
Graduate Program in Historical Archaeology
100 Morrissey Boulevard
Boston, MA 02125-3393
(617) 287-6854
stephen.silliman@umb.edu

Associate Professor
Graduate Program Director

My research focuses on the historical archaeology of Native Americans in northeast and west coast areas of North America. My primary interest is in the cultural continuities and changes in Native American groups as they navigated the social, political, and economic challenges of European and EuroAmerican colonial activities across the North American continent from the 1600s to today. I am interested in the interplay of material culture, architecture, documentary, and oral historical data sources as a way to provide more enriched and relevant documents about the past. My material foci are mass-produced goods such as ceramics and glass, and stone tools, together with analytical methods including geochemistry, soil chemistry, and spatial analysis, all of which I use to try to address the nature of daily cultural practice, identity, labor, gender, and community life for people in the past.

Selected Publications

2008 Silliman, Stephen W. Editor. Collaborating at the Trowel’s Edge: Teaching and Learning in Indigenous Archaeology. Amerind Studies in Archaeology 2. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Hall, Martin and Stephen W. Silliman Editors. 2006 Historical Archaeology. Malden and London: Blackwell Publishing.

2005 Culture Contact or Colonialism? Challenges in the Archaeology of Native North America. American Antiquity 70(1): 55-74.

2004 Lost Laborers in Colonial California: Native Americans and the Archaeology of Rancho Petaluma. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Paperback printing, 2008.