Investigators Rebecca M. Brazilai

Rebecca M. Barzilai is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University studying Mississippian societies in the Midwestern United States. Her research interests include ceramic analysis, archaeometry and geochemical applications to ceramic compositional studies, popular archaeology and media, and digital archaeologies. After receiving a B.A. from the Anthropology Department at Barnard College in 2008 on her analysis of the composition and style of pottery from the Clements Site (dating to the Coalition Period, locally known as the Valdez Phase AD 900-1190), near Taos, New Mexico, she received an M.A. from Indiana University in 2013 and is working on her dissertation characterizing the geochemical and petrographic composition of ceramics from the Emerald Site near Lebanon, IL.

Rebecca has done fieldwork throughout the Midwest for the Solving the Mystery of Yankeetown, Revealing Cahokia’s Religion, and Emerald Acropolis Projects. Internationally, she has done fieldwork in Ecuador investigating Incan frontiers and pre-Inca Cayambe communities with the Pambamarca Archaeological Project. Current research projects include her dissertation work on ceramic composition, funded by the Indiana Academy of Science and David C. Skomp Fund from the department of Anthropology at Indiana University, studying painted daub from the Angel Site in southwest Indiana and the Midwestern United States, with a grant from the Glenn A. Black Laboratory of Archaeology, and the utilization of 3D modeling of archaeological materials and sites for visualization and analysis.