SAS Communications Chair
Graduate Student
Advisor: Dr. C. Margaret Scarry
joymers@ad.unc.edu
Smith Building 002
About Joy
I'm interested in social and ecological contexts of food production and procurement, particularly in the form of traditional ecological knowledge. How is knowledge about the landscape shared within a community and across generations? How might this knowledge underlie agricultural practice? What happens when we look at food procurement/production as a spatial, ecological, landscape-based phenomenon?
Research Interests
Foodways, archaeobotany, food procurement and production, landscape and ecology, Mississippian agriculture, traditional ecological knowledge, GIS
Education
MA, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, 2022; BA, Washington University in St. Louis, 2018
Previous Courses
ANTH 101 - General Anthropology
Publications
“Reimagining the Development of Downtown Cahokia Using Remote Sensing Visualizations from the Western Edge of the Grand Plaza” Stauffer et al., 2023, Land 12(2) 342, (coauthored as fourth author)
“Center posts, thunder symbolism, and community organization at Cahokia Mounds, Illinois”, Mersmann and Stauffer, 2021, book chapter in Archaeologies of Cosmoscapes in the Americas