Barbara Mills

Barbara J. Mills is Professor of Anthropology and an interdisciplinary faculty member with AIS. She has been teaching at the University of Arizona since 1991, following two years on the faculty at Northern Arizona University. From 1993-2004 she directed the University of Arizona Archaeological Field School, where she worked on collaborative heritage projects with the White Mountain Apache Tribe, the Hopi Tribe, and the Apache Sitgreaves National Forests. She also worked closely with the Pueblo of Zuni on a recent NEH-funded exhibit, "Hawikku: Echos of Our Past" for their tribal museum. Her research interests include Southwest archaeology, Native American ceramics, archaeologies of inequality (especially gender and colonialism), migration, identity, and heritage preservation. Professor Mills mentors American Indian students in anthropology and teaches undergraduate and graduate courses that are cross-listed in AIS, including "From Clovis to Coronado: Archaeology of the Southwest" (ANTH/AIS 205) and "Southwest Land and Society" (ANTH/AIS/LAS 418/518), and seminars in anthropology of interest to AIS students (Archaeology and American Indians, Archaeology of the Borderlands). Her most recent edited books include "Alternative Leadership Strategies in the Prehispanic Southwest," University of Arizona Press, 2000, and "Identity, Feasting and the Archaeology of the Greater Southwest," University Press of Colorado, 2004. She is currently writing a book about migration and ethnogenesis in the Western Pueblo area that focuses on the effects of the demographic upheavals of the thirteenth century for Ancestral Pueblo populations.