Michael J. Kolb (born c. 1960) is an American anthropologist. He currently holds the position of Professor of Anthropology at Metropolitan State University of Denver and Presidential Teaching Professor Emeritus at Northern Illinois University, where he also served as Associate Vice Provost.
Kolb received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1991. Kolb has done field work in Polynesia, Europe, and Africa. His research focuses on ancient and historical political economies and the building of monumental architecture. He has published, amongst other things, on the labor energetics in medieval Sicily, ancient Egypt, prehistoric Europe, and Oceania. His most recent book is Making Sense of Monuments (2020). [1]
His research at MSU Denver has focused on the historical archaeology of the downtown West Denver neighborhood (the Auraria Campus) and the water infrastructure of early Denver. [2]
Kolb has worked in Hawaii as the director of the Na Heiau O Maui project, where he conducted an extensive study of ancient Maui temples published in Current Anthropology suggesting that the island temple system was 400 years older than previously thought. [3] He has conducted research on household labor practices related to agroforestry in upland Maui that are relevant to the development of complex societies. [4] [5]
Kolb has also been the director of the Elymi Project in western Sicily, which aims to "describe human landscape transformations around three hilltop settlements" in western Sicily. He has conducted archaeological survey in western Sicily since 1998, revealing a rich settlement system in the community of Salemi that dates from the Copper Age to the medieval period, many of the sites being reoccupied over time. [6] [7] Kolb has also excavated at nearing Salemi, [8] recovering finds that document the presence of residual 6th century BC activity and 4th–3rd century BC settlement, lending credence to the idea that Salemi is the ancient city of Halyciae of the Elymians. He has also discovered what appears to be medieval mosque while investigating Salemi's Norman castle. [9]
Agrigento is a city on the southern coast of Sicily, Italy and capital of the province of Agrigento.
Magna Graecia is a term that was used for the Greek-speaking areas of Southern Italy, in the present-day Italian regions of Calabria, Apulia, Basilicata, Campania and Sicily; these regions were extensively populated by Greek settlers starting from the 8th century BC.
Eretria is a town in Euboea, Greece, facing the coast of Attica across the narrow South Euboean Gulf. It was an important Greek polis in the 6th and 5th century BC, mentioned by many famous writers and actively involved in significant historical events.
Ancient Hawaiʻi is the period of Hawaiian history preceding the unification in 1810 of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi by Kamehameha the Great. Traditionally, researchers estimated the first settlement of the Hawaiian islands as having occurred sporadically between 400 and 1100 CE by Polynesian long-distance navigators from the Samoan, Marquesas, and Tahiti islands within what is now French Polynesia. In 2010, a study was published based on radiocarbon dating of more reliable samples which suggests that the islands were settled much later, within a short timeframe, in about 1219 to 1266.
Enna, known from the Middle Ages until 1926 as Castrogiovanni, is a city and comune located roughly at the center of Sicily, southern Italy, in the province of Enna, towering above the surrounding countryside. It has earned the nicknames belvedere and ombelico ("navel") of Sicily.
Halyciae is the ancient name for one of the settlements of the Elymians on the island of Sicily, known as Alicia in more recent Italian scholarship.
The Giza pyramid complex in Egypt is home to the Great Pyramid, the Pyramid of Khafre, and the Pyramid of Menkaure, along with their associated pyramid complexes and the Great Sphinx. All were built during the Fourth Dynasty of the Old Kingdom of ancient Egypt, between c. 2600 – c. 2500 BC. The site also includes several temples, cemeteries, and the remains of a workers' village.
Teppe Hasanlu or Hasanlu Tepe is an archeological site of an ancient city located in northwest Iran, a short distance south of Lake Urmia. The nature of its destruction at the end of the 9th century BC essentially froze one layer of the city in time, providing researchers with extremely well preserved buildings, artifacts, and skeletal remains from the victims and enemy combatants of the attack. The site was likely associated with the Mannaeans.
Motya was an ancient and powerful city on San Pantaleo Island off the west coast of Sicily, in the Stagnone Lagoon between Drepanum and Lilybaeum. It is within the present-day commune of Marsala, Italy.
Caroline Ann Tuke Malone is a British academic and archaeologist. She was Professor of Prehistory at Queen's University, Belfast from 2013 and is now emeritus professor.
Muhammad Rafiq Mugal is a Pakistani archaeologist, engaged in investigating of ethnoarchaeological research in Chitral, northern Pakistan. He has been responsible for the direction, technical support and supervision for restoration and conservation of more than thirty monuments and excavated remains of the Islamic, Buddhist and Proto-historic periods, in Punjab, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and Gilgit-Baltistan of Pakistan. He served as a professor of archaeology and heritage management and the director of undergraduate studies at Boston University. He is now Professor Emeritus of Archaeology at Boston University.
Salemi is a town and comune in southwestern Sicily, Italy, administratively part of the province of Trapani. It is one of I Borghi più belli d'Italia.
Monte Polizzo is an archaeological site located 6 km northwest of the town of Salemi, in the province of Trapani, western Sicily, southern Italy. It occupies an easily defended hilltop, from which a vast area of western Sicily can be seen, and consists of an interconnected group of ridges, the highest point of which is 725.9 m (2359 feet) above sea level. The settlement has been dated to c. 9th - 4th centuries BC.
El Pilar is an ancient Maya city center located on the Belize-Guatemala border. The site is located 12 kilometres (7.5 mi) north of San Ignacio, Belize and can be accessed through the San Ignacio and Bullet Tree Falls on the Belize River. The name "El Pilar" is Spanish for "watering basin", reflecting the abundance of streams around the site and below its escarpment, which is rare in the Maya area.
Patrick Vinton Kirch is an American archaeologist and Professor Emeritus of Integrative Biology and the Class of 1954 Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also the former Curator of Oceanic Archaeology in the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, and director of that museum from 1999 to 2002. Currently, he is professor in the department of anthropology at the University of Hawai'i Manoa, and a member of the board of directors of the Bishop Museum.

Sarah Milledge Nelson was an American archaeologist and Distinguished Professor Emerita from the Department of Anthropology, University of Denver, United States.
Pakistani architecture is intertwined with the architecture of the broader Indian subcontinent. The major architectural styles popular in the past were Temple, Indo-Islamic, Mughal and Indo-Saracenic architecture, all of which have many regional varieties. With the beginning of the Indus civilization around the middle of the 3rd millennium BC, for the first time in the area which encompasses today's Pakistan an advanced urban culture developed with large structural facilities, some of which survive to this day. This was followed by the Gandhara style of Buddhist architecture that borrowed elements from Ancient Greece. These remnants are visible in the Gandhara capital of Taxila.
Archeological sites in Azerbaijan first gained public interest in the mid-19th century and were reported by European travellers.
Lorenzo Nigro is an Italian archaeologist, novelist and watercolorist. He is Full Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology in the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy at Sapienza University of Rome. He directs three main archaeological expeditions: at Jericho in Palestine, with the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, at the Early Bronze Age fortified city, previously unknown, of Khirbet al-Batrawy in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and at Motya, a Phoenician city in Western Sicily, while also acting as co-director of the Institut national du patrimoine-Sapienza University of Rome Expedition to Carthage in Tunisia. Since 2015 he started the archaeological exploration and protection activities, again in cooperation with the Palestinian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, in the Bronze and Iron Age necropolises of the Bethlehem urban area and at the site of Tell esh-Sheikh Abu Zarad, ancient Tappuah. In all these excavations he has been the protagonist of several important discoveries, from the reconstruction of the Bronze Age city at Jericho, to the Temple of the Kothon at Motya, to the entire unknown city of Batrawy with its magnificent fortifications and the Palace of the Copper Axes, and the Broad Room temple. At Motya it has uncovered at least four temples and detailed a prehistoric stratigraphy at the foot of the acropolis showing that the island in Sicily was occupied and known to Mediterranean sailormen since the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC.
Miriam T. Stark is an American archaeologist whose field experience and emphasis of studies have included locations in North America, the Near East and Southeast Asia. She is currently a professor of Southeast Asian Archaeology at the University of Hawai’i-Manoa, a position she has held since August 1995. Having first received her B.A. from the University of Michigan, she went on to complete her M.A and PhD from the University of Arizona. Stark has co-directed the Lower Mekong Archaeological Project (LOMAP), located in southern Cambodia for the past 12 years. Her research focus not only includes the various aspects of political economy, but also on the process of state formation.