E. Christian Wells, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor & Graduate Director

curriculum vitae

I am a Mesoamerican archaeologist with research interests centering on ritual, economy, and the environment in small-scale societies. My current research focuses on the long-term environmental consequences of how prehispanic peoples living in southeastern Mesoamerica perceived and interacted with soil, land, and earth.

Soil knowledge from other cultures across the globe and through time is of great value for solving social and ecological problems. Such perspectives are useful because they are long-term and time-tested, and because they are holistically integrated with other aspects of society, including religion, politics, and the economy. The problem is that local knowledge systems are often overshadowed by empirical science and overwhelmed by colonialism and globalization. In this respect, archaeologists have a lot to offer, since we can reconstruct socioecological patterns that lasted for thousands of years.

For these reasons, I created the Cultural Soilscapes Research Group, a cross-disciplinary faculty-student collaborative whose primary goal is to study human/soil dynamics from an anthropological perspective using techniques developed in both the social and natural sciences, including archaeology, ethnography, ethnohistory, geography, geology, and chemistry. With funding from the National Geographic Society, our recent research concerns the changing relationship between land use and soil management in Honduran farming communities over the past two millennia. The aim of this work is to discover and apply new information about ancient soil systems to help address natural resource challenges of the present and future.

My research into soil and culture is wide ranging—from ancient agriculture to modern forensics—but is integrated by the core concepts of applied archaeology, economic anthropology, ritual economy, and cultural soilscapes. I teach a number of courses that follow these interests, including a graduate seminar in Economic Anthropology, an undergraduate seminar in Soil and Culture, and introductory courses to Archaeology, Mesoamerican Archaeology, Quantitative Methods, and Advanced Quantitative Methods.