Susan McIntosh

Susan McIntosh holds advanced degrees from Cambridge University (M.A.) and the University of California at Santa Barbara (Ph.D.).  She has taught at Rice University since 1980 and has held the position of Professor of Anthropology since 1989. In 1989–1990, she was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.  She is the co-author or editor of three major monographs on field research in Mali and Senegal at the sites of Jenné-jeno (BAR; University of California Press) and Sincu Bara (2002 CRIAA/IFAN).  A fourth book, on the use of African data for understanding the emergence and development of complex societies, was published in 1999 by Cambridge University Press.  In 2000, Columbia University Press published The way the Wind Blows, the proceedings of a conference on climate change and human response in history, which she organized and edited with J. Tainter and R.McIntosh.  In addition, she has authored or co-authored over 60 articles on West African fieldwork or issues relating to complex societies in Africa.  She has also authored a series of overviews of West African archaeology and is currently writing a book for Cambridge University Press on the Holocene archaeology of West Africa.  Her main fieldwork has concentrated on the development of iron-using societies in the two great floodplains of the Middle Niger and the Middle Senegal Valleys.  She has co-directed field research in Mali and Senegal for ten seasons since 1980, funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society, and a private foundation.

Because of the growing problem of looting of terracotta statuettes from Middle Niger sites, she has become involved in issues of archaeological heritage and cultural property over the past decade, and has published and lectured widely on these topics.  In 1996, she was appointed by President Clinton to the Cultural Property Advisory Committee, where she served two terms, until 2003.  She has also served as a member of the Archaeology Panel at NSF.  She is on the editorial boards of numerous journals, and from 2002–2004, she served as President of the Society of Africanist Archaeologists.

Her current research focuses on the emergence of large-scale, complex societies in Africa, the impact of climate and environmental change on human society in the past, and the politics of archaeology and archaeological representations of the past.