Curriculum Vitae

Biographical Sketch

Publications / Preprints

Recent Courses

UNC Committees

Vincas P. Steponaitis
Director, Research Laboratories of Archaeology
Professor, Department of Anthropology

Degrees: University of Michigan, Ph.D. (1980), M.A. (1975); Harvard University, A.B. (1974).

Interests: Archaeology, complex societies, ceramic analysis, quantitative methods, locational analysis; North America.

Mailing Address: Research Laboratories of Archaeology, CB #3120, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3120

Email:  Office:

vin@unc.edu Alumni 108

Phone: Fax:

(919) 962-3846 (919) 962-1613

Current Research

Archaeology of Moundville. The history and political economy of Moundville, a large Mississippian town in Alabama that was occupied from the 11th to the 17th centuries AD, have long been subjects of my research. In addition to numerous articles, my books on this topic include Ceramics, Chronology, and Community Patterns: An Archaeological Study at Moundville (Academic Press, 1983), and Archaeology of the Moundville Chiefdom (co-edited with Vernon J. Knight, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998). My current research attempts to reconstruct patterns of craft production and trade by attempting to identify the geological sources of the raw materials used to make "prestige goods" at Moundville. Published articles exemplifying this approach include "Large-Scale Patterns in the Chemical Composition of Mississippian Pottery" (American Antiquity, 1996), "Composition and Provenance of Greenstone Artifacts from Moundville" (Southeastern Archaeology, 2001), and "A Petrographic Study of Moundville Palettes" (Southeastern Archaeology 2002). Other such works, all in collaboration with geologists and geochemists, are currently in progress.

Digital Publication in Archaeology. In collaboration with Steve Davis and others, I have worked on a variety of projects exploring the frontiers of digital publication in archaeology. The most elaborate and visible of these projects is a CD-ROM entitled Excavating Occaneechi Town, published by UNC Press in 1998. We have also developed a new edition of this work that will be formally published by UNC Press on the World Wide Web. A "beta" version of this new edition can be found at www.ibiblio.org/dig.

Archaeology of the Natchez Bluffs. My long standing interest in the archaeology of the Lower Mississippi Valley is reflected in the edited volume, The Natchez District in the Old, Old South (Center for the Study of the American South, 1998). I continue to work on a book called The Archaeology of the Natchez Bluffs (co-authored with Jeffrey Brain and Ian Brown).