Three recent National Science Foundation–funded projects in the Department of Anthropology upend familiar narratives by centering places, practices, and relationships that archaeology has historically overlooked.
From ancient Indigenous garden beds hidden beneath Michigan forests, to pigs shaping political life in early China, to evidence of long‑overlooked Indigenous villages beneath New England soil, this research asks fundamental questions about how human societies take shape and whose histories are made visible.
“Securing three NSF grants in such a competitive funding environment is a remarkable achievement that speaks to the exceptional quality and significance of research happening in our department,” says Nathaniel Dominy, chair of the Department of Anthropology. “This work that not only advances archaeological methods but fundamentally challenges how we understand Indigenous histories and human-environment relationships.”
Unearthing the Great Lakes' agricultural past
When it comes to the northern Great Lakes, people have long imagined dense forests, short growing seasons, and vast lakes. Expansive agricultural fields, especially those devoted to maize, rarely figure into that picture. Assistant professor Madeleine McLeester’s research at the Sixty Islands archaeological site turns that assumption on its head.
Located along the Menominee River, Sixty Islands is the largest ancestral Native American agricultural field system in the eastern United States, raising fundamental questions about how, why, and by whom this landscape was shaped. The people who farmed there were not part of a rigid hierarchy, nor were they farming in an obviously favorable environment. Instead, they were small-scale, egalitarian communities taking on what McLeester describes as “a very risky, labor-intensive practice.”
“The existence of intensive agriculture at the Sixty Islands challenges foundational theories in archaeological thinking surrounding the impetus for and mechanics of intensive agriculture,” says McLeester. “It tells us that humans are practicing agriculture far outside of the places we typically look for it. It changes where we look and what we are looking for.”
Working in close collaboration with the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin, McLeester and her research team are reconstructing the scale, technologies, and environmental context of this farming system. By combining geophysical surveys, excavation, and archaeobotanical and ecological analyses, the project provides insight into how people in the past deliberately transformed northern forests into agricultural landscapes—knowledge that speaks to current conversations about sustainability, land use, and climate resilience.
Revealing how pigs shaped early Chinese societies
In many histories of agriculture and early states, animals appear only in the background—resources to be controlled, consumed, or symbolized. Assistant professor Jiajing Wang’s research brings pigs to the center of the story. Focusing on ancient China, one of the world’s earliest centers of pig domestication, Wang traces how relationships between humans and pigs changed over thousands of years, alongside the emergence of agriculture and growing social inequality.
“Domestication reshaped food systems, economies, environments, and social organization—and animals were active participants in that process, not just its products,” says Wang. “By showing how everyday human-animal interactions can drive large social and political change, the project offers deep historical perspective on problems we still face today.”
The project follows a long arc of interaction across nine archaeological sites, spanning roughly 9,000 to 3,500 years ago. Using microfossil evidence preserved in dental calculus on pig teeth along with traditional zooarchaeological data, Wang reconstructs what pigs ate, where they lived, and how closely they were integrated into human communities, revealing domestication to be a gradual process shaped by daily care, feeding, and proximity.
By tracking how pigs moved from wild to domesticated animals, Wang’s research shows how human-animal interactions helped produce large-scale social change. In doing so, it offers a deeper historical perspective on questions that still resonate today around food, inequality, and human relationships with other species.
Challenging the myth of an untouched New England
For generations, much of New England has been imagined as a largely untouched wilderness prior to European colonization. Archaeological evidence that might complicate that picture has often been difficult to find, eroded by acidic soils and centuries of land use. Jonathan Alperstein’s dissertation research, supervised by Jesse Casana, W.J. Bryant 1925 Professor of Archaeology, takes direct aim at this narrative by asking who was living in the Upper Connecticut River Valley before colonial settlement and what the landscape looked like at that time.
The project reframes how people understand regional history. “It directly counters pervasive wilderness myths of New England by showing a landscape where Indigenous people are not just passive actors but intentionally modify and manage their surroundings,” says Alperstein, a doctoral student in the Ecology, Evolution, Environment, and Society PhD program.
Through a combination of remote sensing, terrestrial geophysics, and archaeobotanical analysis, Alperstein is identifying traces of Indigenous settlement and agriculture that are largely invisible on the surface today. Early results include the identification of multiple houses within a single site, pointing to Woodland villages rather than transient camps.
Alperstein’s work builds on years of collaboration with local farmers and community stakeholders and is carried out in close partnership with Dartmouth’s Spatial Archaeometry Lab (SPARCL). “Our work with SPARCL usually allows us to implement regional remote sensing and terrestrial geophysics across the globe,” says Alperstein. “It is a privilege to be able to do this where Dartmouth is situated, within the Upper Connecticut River Valley.”