Dr. Colin Grier
Ph.D., Arizona State University
Assistant Professor
Archaeology
Research Interests
Pacific Northwest Coast; complex hunter-gatherers; faunal analysis; archaeological theory
My archaeological research centers
on investigating the economic
organization, social institutions
and political economy of
complex hunter-gatherers, particularly
those in coastal settings.
My primary geographical focus
is the Northwest Coast of North
America, where I am looking into
the relationship between the development
of large households, village formation,
social inequality, and intensive
storage economies. My research
has been driven by on-going fieldwork in coastal southern
British Columbia involving excavations at early village
sites on the Gulf Islands in the Strait of Georgia,
particularly those dating to the Marpole period (2500
to 1000 BP). These projects continue to fuel opportunities
for field-based graduate student research, archaeological
field schools, and collaborative research with local
Coast Salish aboriginal groups.
I received my Ph.D. from Arizona State University
in 2001 and have since completed a SSHRC Postdoctoral
Fellowship and taught at the University of British
Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Over the past decade
I have directed a suite of field projects on the Northwest
Coast supported by grants from both academic and
non-academic sources. These projects have been designed
to collect data from various scales, including
households, villages, and local and regional settlement
patterns. My past and present research interests also include
prehistoric Arctic whaling societies, the German Upper
Paleolithic, prehistoric Ireland and Chulmun-period
Korea. I am constantly looking to expand the archaeological
contexts in which questions concerning hunter-gatherer
organization can be addressed.
Courses
Undergraduate
- ANTH 101 - General Anthropology
- ANTH 430 - Introduction to Archaeological Method and Theory
Graduate
- ANTH 537 - Quantitative Methods in Anthropology
- ANTH 540 - Prehistory of the Northwest Coast
- ANTH 546 - Complexity in Small Scale Societies
Representative Publications
2007 Consuming the Recent for Constructing the Ancient:
The Role of Ethnography in Coast Salish
Archaeological Interpretation. In Be Of Good Mind:
Essays on the Coast Salish, edited by B.G. Miller.
UBC Press, Vancouver, B.C., Canada.
2006 Beyond Affluent Foragers: Rethinking Hunter-Gatherer Complexity, edited by C. Grier, J. Kim, and J. Uchiyama. Oxbow Books, Oxford, UK.
2006 Temporality in Northwest Coast Households. In Household Archaeology on the Northwest Coast, edited by E.A. Sobel, D.A. Trieu Gahr, and K.M. Ames, pp. 97-119. International Monographs in Prehistory, Ann Arbor.
2006 The Political Context of Prehistoric Coast Salish Residences on the Northwest Coast. In Palaces and Power in the Americas: From Peru to the Northwest Coast, edited by J.J. Christie and P. J. Sarro, pp. 141-165. University of Texas Press, Austin.
2003 Dimensions of Regional Interaction in the Prehistoric Gulf of Georgia. In Emerging from the Mist: Studies in Northwest Coast Culture History, edited by R.G. Matson, Quentin Mackie, and Gary Coupland, pp. 170-187. UBC Press, Vancouver, BC.
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