A rai stone, or fei stone, is one of many large artifacts that were manufactured and treasured by the native inhabitants of the Yap islands in Micronesia. They are also known as Yapese stone money or similar names.
Richard Joseph Pearson is a Canadian archaeologist.
Jesse David Jennings was an American archaeologist and anthropologist and founding director of the Natural History Museum of Utah. Based at the University of Utah, Jennings is best known for his work on desert west prehistory and his excavation of Danger Cave near Utah's Great Salt Lake. Considered an exacting academic scholar and author, he was known for conducting systematic excavations with order and cleanliness.
Lee Rogers Berger is an American-born South African paleoanthropologist and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence. He is best known for his discovery of the Australopithecus sediba type site, Malapa; his leadership of Rising Star Expedition in the excavation of Homo naledi at Rising Star Cave; and the Taung Bird of Prey Hypothesis.
Lee Ann Newsom is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Pennsylvania State University at University Park. She has written numerous books and articles. She was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2002.
David G. Anderson is an archaeologist in the department of anthropology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who specializes in Southeastern archaeology. His professional interests include climate change and human response, exploring the development of cultural complexity in Eastern North America, maintaining and improving the nation's Cultural Resource management (CRM) program, teaching and writing about archaeology, and developing technical and popular syntheses of archaeological research. He is the project director of the on-line Paleoindian Database of the Americas (PIDBA). and a co-director, with Joshua J. Wells, Eric C, Kansa, and Sarah Whitcher Kansa, of the Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA)
Frances J. White is a British biological anthropologist, professor, and primatologist at the University of Oregon. As a behavioral ecologist, her research focuses on the evolution of primate sociality and social systems. She has studied the socioecology of the bonobo chimpanzee for over 35 years at Lomako Forest in the Democratic Republic of Congo. She is the foremost American authority on this species in the wild and has done extensive field research on the bonobo or pygmy chimpanzees. Her bonobo research examines why bonobos have evolved a very different social system compared to the closely related chimpanzee.
Gerald F. Schroedl is a professor of anthropology at the University of Tennessee. He specializes in Southeastern United States and Caribbean prehistoric and historic archaeological sites. He is an authority on Cherokee prehistory and the archaeology of eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina.
Peter Stafford Bellwood is Emeritus Professor of Archaeology in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra. He is well known for his Out of Taiwan model regarding the spread of Austronesian languages.
Anna Curtenius Roosevelt is an American archaeologist and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois Chicago. She studies human evolution and long-term human-environment interaction. She is one of the leading American archeologists studying Paleoindians in the Amazon basin. Her field research has included significant findings at Marajo Island and Caverna da Pedra Pintada in Brazil. She does additional field work in the Congo Basin. She is the great-granddaughter of United States President Theodore Roosevelt.
Charles T. Meide Jr., known as Chuck Meide, is an underwater and maritime archaeologist and currently the Director of LAMP, the research arm of the St. Augustine Lighthouse & Maritime Museum located in St. Augustine, Florida. Meide, of Syrian descent on his father's side, was born in Jacksonville, Florida, and raised in the adjacent coastal town of Atlantic Beach. He earned BA and MA degrees in Anthropology with a focus in underwater archaeology in 1993 and 2001 from Florida State University, where he studied under George R. Fischer, and undertook Ph.D. studies in Historical Archaeology at the College of William and Mary starting the following year. Meide has participated in a wide array of shipwreck and maritime archaeological projects across the U.S., especially in Florida, and throughout the Caribbean and Bermuda and in Australia and Ireland. From 1995 to 1997 he participated in the search for, discovery, and total excavation of La Salle's shipwreck, La Belle , lost in 1686. From December 1997 to January 1998 he served as Co-Director of the Kingstown Harbour Shipwreck Project, an investigation sponsored by the Institute of Maritime History and Florida State University into the wreck of the French frigate Junon (1778) lost in 1780 in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. In 1999 he directed the Dog Island Shipwreck Survey, a comprehensive maritime survey of the waters around a barrier island off the coast of Franklin County, Florida, and between 2004 and 2006 he directed the Achill Island Maritime Archaeology Project off the coast of County Mayo, Ireland. Since taking over as Director of LAMP in 2006, he has directed the First Coast Maritime Archaeology Project, a state-funded research and educational program focusing on shipwrecks and other maritime archaeological resources in the offshore and inland waters of Northeast Florida. In 2009, during this project, Meide discovered the "Storm Wreck," a ship from the final fleet to evacuate British troops and Loyalist refugees from Charleston at the end of the Revolutionary War, which wrecked trying to enter St. Augustine in late December 1782. He led the archaeological excavation of this shipwreck site each summer from 2010 through 2015, overseeing the recovery of thousands of well-preserved artifacts.
Dennis L. Jenkins is a research archaeologist, field school supervisor for the Oregon State Museum of Anthropology/Museum of Natural and Cultural History at the University of Oregon, and director of the university's Northern Great Basin Field School. One of his excavations led to a new accepted date for earliest human settlement in the Americas. Jenkins' work on coprolites earned him the nickname Dr. Poop.
Ripley Pierce Bullen (1902–1976) was Curator Emeritus at the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida, where he was the Department Chair of Social Sciences for a period of seventeen years (1956–1973). He was an archaeologist primarily associated with the Southeastern United States and Florida, and in his later years he was known as the "dean of Floridian archaeology". He also completed fieldwork in the American Southwest, the New England states, Central America, and the Greater and Lesser Antilles.
Gary M. Feinman is an American archaeologist, and the MacArthur Curator of Mesoamerican, Central American, and East Asian Anthropology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. He was a part of the Valley of Oaxaca Settlement Pattern Project which focused on the evolution of the Monte Albán state and shifts in settlement in the region over three millennia. He has conducted research in the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico for over 30 years, most recently in the lands of the communities Tlacolula, Mitla, Matatlán, and Ejutla. These studies focused on household excavations at three sites. Most recently, he excavated at Lambityeco in collaboration with representatives of the Mexican Institute of Anthropology and History. At Lambityeco, Feinman and colleagues have documented a large Classic-period ball court, which was not previously recorded during surface mapping of this site. The Field Museum of Natural History team also found the largest carved stone ever recovered at this site.
Jon M. Erlandson is an archaeologist, professor emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oregon, and the former director of the University of Oregon Museum of Natural and Cultural History. Erlandson’s research interests include coastal adaptations, the peopling of North America, maritime archaeology and historical ecology and human impacts in coastal ecosystems.
Herbert D. G. Maschner is an American anthropologist and academic administrator. His research interests include biocomplexity and sustainability in prehistoric human ecology, warfare and inequality in prehistory, the application of Darwinian theory and evolutionary psychology to archaeology, GIS in archaeology, isotope analysis and virtual museums and repositories.
Ron Vanderwal was an American-Australian Archaeologist who specialised in the prehistoric archaeology of the Pacific and New Guinea in particular. He worked at La Trobe University and the Museum of Victoria. He died on 19 July 2021.
Elizabeth Jean "Betsy" Reitz is a zooarchaeologist and Professor Emerita in the Georgia Museum of Natural History and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Georgia. She was born in 1946 in Lake Alfred, Florida. She attended Florida Presbyterian College from 1966 to 1967. She received her BA (1969), MA (1975), and her PhD (1979) in Anthropology from the University of Florida. Her dissertation was directed by Elizabeth Wing. In 2012, she was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and in 2014, she was named to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was the recipient of the 2016 Fryxell Award for Interdisciplinary Research in Archaeology, given by the Society for American Archaeology. The Fryxell Award is given to scholars who have made significant contributions in the application of the zoological sciences in archaeology. She is a member of the Committee of Honor of the International Council for Zooarchaeology (ICAZ). In 2019, Reitz was awarded the Southeastern Archaeological Conference's Lifetime Achievement Award.
Theresa A. Singleton is an American archaeologist and writer who focuses on the archaeology of African Americans, the African diaspora, and slavery in the United States. She is a leading archaeologist applying comparative approaches to the study of slavery in the Americas. Singleton has been involved in the excavation of slave residences in the southern United States and in the Caribbean. She is a professor of anthropology at Syracuse University, and serves as a curator for the National Museum of Natural History.
Clark Spencer Larsen is an American biological anthropologist, author, and educator. His work focuses on bioarchaeology, the study of human remains from archaeological settings. Although his interests span the entire record of human evolution, his research largely pertains to the last 10,000 years, a period of dynamic change in health, well-being, and lifestyle, much of which relates to population increase, overcrowding, and nutritional decline that co-occurred with the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture, creating living conditions that humans are grappling with to the present day.
