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Sarah Jackson is an anthropological archaeologist with a research focus on ancient Mesoamerica, and particularly Classic Maya culture. She received the PhD from Harvard University in 2005, and held positions at the University of New Hampshire, the University of Toronto, and the University of Cincinnati before joining the Department of Anthropology at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2023. She currently serves as Dean of Social Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at CU Boulder.

Her broad thematic and theoretical research interests include: materiality (includingÌýthe ways in which the material world is used to mediate social interactions and identities, and culturally-based visions of the material world), investigations into ancient identities, ancient ontologies, personhood (including non-human persons), indigenous political organization, and negotiation of culture change. ÌýMethodologically, she works at the intersection of text and the material record. She is particularly interested in bringing together theoretical ideas with archaeological field practices.

She is currently working on reconstructing aspects of a Classic Maya material worldview (i.e., how they understood and saw the materials around them, including the capabilities and identities of objects, object personhood, and the intersections of objects and identities) using data from hieroglyphic and iconographic sources; this work has an applied aspect, in that she is investigating how an understanding of indigenous material perspectives might impact and transform archaeological field practices. These topics, along with an innovative digital field recording system that unites archaeological and Maya views on material culture, are also explored in the field at the site of Say Kah, Belize, where she co-directs a project with Dr. Linda Brown,Ìýwith funding from Wenner-Gren, National Geographic Society/Waitt, National Geographic Society (CRE), the American Philosophical Society, the Brennan Foundation, the Rust Family Foundation). Some of her publications on these topics are available on her Academia page:

*Dr. Jackson, Dean of Social Sciences, is not accepting Ph.D. applicants at this time.