Email: mbfitts@unc.edu
Phone:
Office:
107 Alumni Hall
Area of Interest:
Archaeology and ethnohistory of indigenous populations in colonial contexts; archaeobotany; materiality, memory, and information technologies; perceptions of stability and change; public archaeology
Education:
M.A. Applied Anthropology, University of South Florida, 2001
B.A. Anthropology, Wesleyan University, 1998
Research & Activities:
My dissertation research focuses on the politics of everyday life within the mid-eighteenth century Catawba Nation of South Carolina. The Catawba of this period bolstered their population, which was continually at risk from epidemic disease and enemy raiding, by incorporating indigenous refugee communities from the surrounding region. Working with Steve Davis and Brett Riggs from the UNC Research Laboratories of Archaeology, I will collect and compare Catawba pottery, botanical remains, and European manufactured goods from two Catawba settlements in order to examine how community members managed this process of population coalescence.
Selected Publications:
2009. (with Charles L. Heath) “Indians Refusing to Carry Burdens”: Understanding the Success of Catawba Political, Military, and Settlement Strategies in Colonial Carolina. IN Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South, edited by Robbie Ethridge and Sheri Shuck-Hall. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
2007. An Archaeological Assessment of the Carolina Commons Tract. Research Laboratories of Archaeology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
2006. Mapping Catawba Coalescence. North Carolina Archaeology 55:1-59.