Program in Early Cultures

Robert Preucel received his doctorate from UCLA in 1988. He was a member of Jim Hill's Pajarito Archaeological Research Project and wrote his dissertation on seasonal agricultural circulation. He was the 6th Annual CAI Visiting Scholar at SIU Carbondale in 1989 and organized a conference on the Processual/Postprocessual debate. In 1990, he took an Assistant Professor position at Harvard University. In 1995, he left Harvard for an Associate Professor position at the University of Pennsylvania. He was made Sally and Alvin V. Shoemaker Professor of Anthropology in 2009 and served as Chair of the Department (2009-2012) and Gregory Annenberg Weingarten Curator-in-charge of the American Section at University of Pennsylvania Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology (2010-2012).

The Kotyiti Research Project is a multiyear collaborative research project established between the University of Pennsylvania and the Pueblo of Cochiti in 1995. It seeks to understand community ethnogenesis using a social theory approach which places the experiences of Pueblo people at center stage. More specifically, the project examines the material expressions of sociopolitical relationships at Koytiti, an ancestral post-Revolt Cochiti community. For the people of Cochiti, Kotyiti is still very much a living site, a sacred place where their ancestors still live. We are particularly interested in tracing out some of the ways in which the people of Kotyiti may have conceptualized themselves in the 17th century as we identify the multiple significances of the community to Cochiti today. Our methodology involves integrating archaeological data, architectural analysis, ethnohistorical documents and traditional narratives, weighing each in different interpretive contexts. We regard our project as an evolving collaboration and hope that it may serve as a model for other such research projects in the Southwest and elsewhere.