Adjunct Assistant Professor
Anthropologist, Archaeologist
marybeth.fitts@unc.edu
919-843-0110
Alumni Building 101C
Research Interests
Archaeology, foodways, coalescence, heritage management, southeastern United States
Specializations
Archaeobotany, GISResearch Background
My research focuses on the materiality and logistics of American Indian persistence in Southeastern North America from the arrival of European colonists to the present day. I seek to document strategies adopted by Indigenous communities as they marshalled traditional knowledge and developed innovative measures to deal with violence and other existential threats created by colonization, ranging from the trade in American Indian slaves during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to epidemic disease and war. To this end I use archaeobotanical and ceramic analysis to detail food and craft production, geographic information to understand how villages were maintained and relocated, and archival documents to provide clues to the names of communities and the individuals who lived there. Most of my work to date has focused on strategies enacted by members of the Catawba Indian Nation to maintain sociopolitical autonomy during the first half of the eighteenth century.
I am also interested in public archaeology and cultural heritage management, including the maintenance and use of large institutional datasets, developing criteria and contexts for prioritizing research and preservation, and establishing collaborative partnerships for investigating and stewarding archaeological sites. The ongoing impacts of climate change on archaeological sites is a pressing concern; while at the North Carolina Office of State Archaeology I supervised the state’s climate change research program, helping to secure grant funding for a hybrid terrestrial-underwater survey designed to document sites damaged by hurricanes on state-managed shorelines.
Education
PhD, University of North Carolina, 2015; MA, University of South Florida, 2001; BA, Wesleyan University, 1998