Samantha  Fladd
Ph.D.,  University of Arizona
Assistant Professor
Director Museum of Anthropology
Archaeology

 

 

Research Interests

I am an anthropological archaeologist who focuses on the Southwest United States, specifically the Ancestral Pueblos of the Four Corners region. I am interested in the ways social groups negotiate their identities through relationships to their spatial setting, incorporating traditional architectural approaches with studies of depositional practices and room decommissioning. I have conducted fieldwork in Chaco Canyon, northeastern Arizona, and southwestern Colorado.  I utilize archival records and museum collections in my research frequently. Currently, I am developing a co-directed collaborative project focused on intersectional identities of women in the history of the northern Southwest.

 

As the Director of the Museum of Anthropology, I am committed to decolonial approaches that center the originating and descendent communities of the materials we house as well as their representation through exhibits and outreach activities. I am particularly interested in the development of co-curated and community-led exhibits, implementing cultural care in collections practices, research on the history of archaeology, and the creation of digital archives.

 

Selected Publications

 

Bishop, Katelyn J., Samantha G. Fladd, and Adam S. Watson
2023 Reassessing Nearly a Century of Faunal Remains and Excavation Data from Chaco Canyon. In Pushing Boundaries: Proceedings of the 2018 Southwest Symposium, edited by Stephen Nash and Erin Baxter. University Press of Colorado, Louisville.

Plog, Stephen, Katelyn J. Bishop, Douglas J. Kennet, Samantha Fladd, and Thomas K. Harper
2022 Scarlet Macaws and the Evolution of Ritual, Hierarchy, and Sociopolitical Organization in the Pueblo Southwest: A Chaco Canyon Case Study. In Birds of the Sun: Macaws, Parrots, and People in the Pre-Hispanic U.S. Southwest and Mexican Northwest, edited by Christopher Schwartz, Stephen Plog, and Patricia A. Gilman. University of Arizona Press, Tucson.

Fladd, Samantha G., Saul L. Hedquist, and E. Charles Adams
2021 Trash Reconsidered: A Relational Approach to Deposition in the Pueblo Southwest. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology DOI: 10.1016/j.jaa.2021.101268.

Fladd, Samantha G., Saul L. Hedquist, E. Charles Adams, and Stewart B. Koyiyumptewa
2021 Symbolic Associations: Assessing the Co-Occurrence of Ash and Turquoise in the Ancient U.S. Southwest. In Agents of Change: The Deposition and Manipulation of Ash in the Past, edited by Barbara J. Roth and E. Charles Adams, pp. 61–75. Berghahn Books, New York.

Fladd, Samantha G. and Claire S. Barker
2019 Miniature in Everything but Meaning: A Contextual Analysis of Miniature Vessels at Homol’ovi I. American Antiquity84(1):107–126. DOI:10.1017/aaq.2018.79.

Fladd, Samantha G., Claire S. Barker, E. Charles Adams, Dwight C. Honyouti, and Saul L. Hedquist
2019 To and From Hopi: Negotiating identity through migration, coalescence, and closure at the Homol’ovi Settlement. In The Continuous Path: Pueblo Movement and the Archaeology of Becoming**, edited by Samuel Duwe and Robert Preucel, pp. 124¬¬–146. University of Arizona Press: Tucson.

Bishop, Katelyn J. and Samantha G. Fladd
2018 Ritual Fauna and Social Organization at Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon. Kiva 84(3):293–316. DOI: 10.1080/00231940.2018.1489623. *Winner of the Julian D. Hayden Student Paper Competition.

McCool, Jon-Paul P., Samantha G. Fladd, Vernon L. Scarborough, Stephen Plog, Nicholas P. Dunning, Lewis A. Owen, Adam S. Watson, Katelyn J. Bishop, Brooke E. Crowley, Elizabeth A. Haussner, Kenneth B. Tankersley, David Lentz, Christopher Carr, and Jessica L. Thress
2018 Soil Salinity in Discussions of Agricultural Feasibility for Ancient Civilizations: A Critical Review of the Data and Debate at Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. PLoS ONE 13(6):e0198290. http://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0198290

Scarborough, Vernon L., Samantha G. Fladd, Nicolas P. Dunning, Stephen Plog, Lewis A. Owen, Christopher Carr, Kenneth B. Tankersley, Jon-Paul McCool, Adam S. Watson, Elizabeth A. Haussner, Brooke Crowley, Katelyn J. Bishop, David L. Lentz, and R. Gwinn Vivian
2018 Water Uncertainty, Agricultural Canals, and Ritual Predictability at Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. Antiquity 92(364):870–889. DOI:10.15184/aqy.2018.114

Adams, E. Charles and Samantha G. Fladd
2017 Composition and Interpretation of Stratified Deposits in Ancestral Hopi Villages at Homol’ovi. Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences 9(6):1101–1114.

Fladd, Samantha G.
2017 Social syntax: An approach to spatial modification through the reworking of space syntax for archaeological applications. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 47:127–138.