As an archaeological anthropologist, I have long-term research commitments to the landscape, material culture, and local communities of northern New Mexico. My work draws upon the remarkable archaeology and rich cultural diversity in this region (1) to develop new accounts of the pre-Columbian, colonial, and modern histories of the American Southwest and (2) to intervene in a series of broader intellectual debates regarding premodern religion, non-state political action, and the materiality of social life, generally conceived. My first book, An Archaeology of Doings: Secularism and the Study of Pueblo Religion (2012, SAR Press), brings together a decade’s worth of fieldwork designed to investigate the changing religious life of Pueblo communities in northern New Mexico from the eleventh century to the present. In the course of these investigations, An Archaeology of Doings mounts a sustained critique of the secular foundations of traditional archaeological understandings of “premodern religion” and develops an alternative analytic based upon the indigenous category of
“doings.”

My current research builds from an ongoing archaeological survey of the Rio Grande Gorge, a large rift valley in northern New Mexico filled with 10,000 years of rock art, trails, and shrines that has been the focus of my summer fieldwork since 2007. This research has been designed as an exploration of the relationship between icon and place, building from the premise that the interplay of environmental and iconographic features is central to the aesthetics and agency of landscapes within indigenous traditions. How did patterns of light and shadow on a boulder’s surface, the growth of lichen across a rock face, the proximity to water, or the view of sacred mountains affect the production and interpretation of rock art in the past? How do divergent cultural understandings of the nature of sunlight, stones, and rivers lead to different experiences of dwelling in landscape and reading its signs? These and other questions stand at the heart of my next book project, tentatively entitled Figured Ground: Landscape Archaeology in the American Southwest (in prep), which is being expressly written as a contribution to what I have suggested is an emerging “Southwest School" of landscape archaeology.

Many future research directions are emerging from my fieldwork in the Rio Grande Gorge. In 2008, I discovered an extensive distribution of rock art panels in the Plains Biographic tradition that has led me to begin work on the problem of Comanche imperialism in New Mexico during the eighteenth century. The additional discovery of an elaborate network of Catholic panels surrounding an abandoned morada is further drawing me toward studies of the 19th century Penitente tradition and the complicated question of how Catholic sacred landscapes developed in dialogue with indigenous understandings of place. In collaboration with one of my graduate students, Kaet Heupel, I have also participated in an archaeology of 1960s commune culture in northern New Mexico—together, we have initiated excavations at the New Buffalo Commune, marking the beginning of what we hope will be an
ongoing archaeological engagement with 1960s radicalism in the Southwest. Each of these research threads will keep me busy at work for many years to come.

On campus at Barnard, I coordinate the archaeological concentration in anthropology and teach a variety of introductory and upper-level courses including “Origins of Human Society,” “Pre-Columbian Histories of Native America,” “Archaeology of Idols,” and “Thing Theory.” While away from campus during the summer, I direct Barnard's field program in New Mexico. This program creates an opportunity for between 5-10 Barnard and Columbia students each summer to gain first-hand experiences on archaeological surveys and excavations, collecting data that in many cases leads to senior theses and presentations at professional archaeological conferences. Academic Focus: materiality, religion, iconography, cultural landscapes, archaeology of the contemporary past, American Southwest

Recent Presentations:
2012. Gesture and performance in Comanche rock art. Invited paper, presented as part of the Art Makes Society session at the 77th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. (with Jimmy Arterberry)

2012. Anatopism. Invited paper, presented as part of the Charting a Course for the Material Turn session at the Theoretical Archaeology Group meetings at University at Buffalo, SUNY.

2011. The chimpanzee’s cringe: on the power of the corpse. Invited paper, presented as part of the Presidential Panel on Religion and Materiality, Society for the Anthropology of Religion, Santa Fe.

2011. The Stone Age after the Stoned Age. Presented as part of The Persistence of the Sixties: Countercultural Archaeologies of New Buffalo session at the Theoretical Archaeology Group meeting, UC Berkeley.

2011. The illusion of post-disciplinarity. Invited paper, presented as part of a student-organized (Scientists and Engineers for a Better Society) seminar on the relationship between the sciences and
humanities, Columbia University.

Books:
2012. An Archaeology of Doings: Secularism and the Study of Pueblo Religion. SAR Press, Santa Fe. in preparation. Figured Ground: Landscape Archaeologies in the American Southwest. in preparation. The Archaeology of Taos, New Mexico. (with Michael Adler)

Selected Articles and Chapters: (forthcoming) Staging the Passion in a pagan land. Event place performance: theorizing architectural spaces in the ancient world(s), edited by Omur Harmanah and Catherine Becker. (Severin Fowles and Darryl Wilkinson)

(forthcoming) Writing against collapse. In Counternarratives: Papers in Honor of Norman Yoffee, edited by Geoffrey Emberling. Cambridge University Press.

(forthcoming) On torture in societies against the state. In Violence and Civilization, edited by Rod Campbell. Joukowsky Institute, Brown University.

2012. The absence of modernity. In Oxford Handbook of the Contemporary Past, edited by Paul Graves-Brown and Rodney Harrison. Oxford University Press. (Severin Fowles and Kaet Heupel)

2012. The Pueblo village in an age of reformation. In Oxford Handbook of North American Archaeology, edited by Timothy Pauketat. Oxford University Press, London.

2011. “Worlds otherwise”: archaeology, anthropology and ontological difference. Current Anthropology 52(6):896-912. (Ben Alberti, Severin Fowles, Martin Holbraad and Yvonne Marshall, Christopher Witmore)

2011. Movement and the unsettling of the Pueblos. In Rethinking Anthropological Perspectives on Migration, edited by Graciela Cabana and Jeffrey Clark. University of Florida Press.

2011. Becoming Hopi, becoming Tiwa: two Pueblo histories of movement. In Margaret Nelson and Colleen Strawhacker (editors), Movement, Connectivity, and Landscape Change in the Ancient Southwest.

University Press of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado (Wesley Bernardini and Severin Fowles) 2011. Archaeology in the humanities. Diogenes 229:77-103. Special issue on “The Humanities Today,” edited by Anders Petterson. (Norman Yoffee and Severin Fowles, published in six languages)

2010. A people’s history of the American Southwest. In Ancient Complexities: New Perspectives in Pre-Columbian North America, edited by Susan Alt. University of Utah Press, Provo.

2010. The Southwest School of landscape archaeology. Annual Review of Anthropology 39:453-468.

2010. People without things. In The Anthropology of Absence: Materialisations of Transcendence and Loss, edited by Mikkel Bille, Frida Hastrup, and Tim Flohr Sørensen, pp. 23-41. Springer Press, New
York.

2009. The enshrined Pueblo: villagescape and cosmos in the northern Rio Grande. American Antiquity 74(3):448-466. 2008. Steps toward an archaeology of taboo. In Religion, Archaeology, and the Material World, edited by Lars Fogelin, pp. 15-37. Center for Archaeological Investigations, Occasional Paper No. 36. Southern Illinois