Welcome New Faculty!

We are pleased to welcome Laurie Wilkie to the greater Berkeley community this fall semester as an Assistant Professor in the Anthropology Department and Faculty Associate in ARF. Dr. Wilkie is an exceptional hire who will renew and re-energize the development of a strong program in historical archaeology and anthropology on the Berkeley campus. She received her B.A. degree with Honors from Syracuse University in 1988, and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1990 and 1994, respectively. Before we enticed her away, she was an Instructor in the Department of Geography and Anthropology at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.

Dr. Wilkie is one of the most promising young scholars in the field of historical archaeology today. She has generated a very solid record of scholarly research and teaching excellence since 1988, when she first entered graduate school at U.C.L.A. In this short time, she has directed or co-directed more than a dozen significant archaeological projects in Louisiana, the West Indies (Bahamas, North Caicos Island, and the Windward Islands), and California. Furthermore, she has developed a highly innovative approach to the study of the past through the sophisticated interplay of multiple lines of evidence from historical documents, archaeological materials, and informant interviews. Using this approach, she has examined the material culture of plantation life, contextualizing and interpreting the material remains of children's play, the spiritual world of "Hoodoo cults," and the ethnomedical practices African-American laborers. The results of her research are published in a monograph, "Ethnicity, Community and Power: An Archaeological Study of the African-American Experience at Oakley Plantation, Louisiana", and in an ever increasing number of articles in such varied journals as Southeastern Archaeology, Louisiana Folklife, African-American Archaeology and Louisiana History.

She initiated this stimulating research while teaching a wide range of popular lower division courses at Louisiana State University, including Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology, Introduction to Physical Anthropology, and Introduction to Archaeology. She is currently teaching an upper division undergraduate course at Berkeley on American material culture. She will soon be teaching other related courses in historical archaeology and historical anthropology, laboratory classes in the analysis of archaeological materials, and summer archaeological field schools.

Her current field projects consider the creation and maintenance of ethnic identity within pluralistic societies, with special reference to African-American ethnicity in historic and contemporary communities. She has expressed a strong interest in undertaking field work again in California in the near future.

Welcome to the Berkeley campus Laurie!

--Kent Lightfoot