Nan Rothschild        Research Professor

 Research Professor
 Ph.D. from New York University, 1975

Professor Rothschild is an archaeologist and an anthropologist working in North America during the historic period (defined by when Europeans arrived and began writing things down, or creating "history"). She has done field work in two areas: in and around New York City, and in the American southwest, New Mexico to be specific, where she excavated on the Zuni reservation and in the Rio Grande Valley near Placitas. She has also worked with museum collections and sees the significance of such collections of things, especially in light of new kinds of research questions that have emerged as anthropology has reconnected to and reinvigorated material culture studies.

She has many interests that focus on the intersection of people, space and things; most recently she has published on colonial interactions between Native Americans and Europeans, and is beginning a new project on how archaeological excavations have contributed to our understanding of contemporary American cities. Her current field project examines a 19th c. African-American and Irish community that was evicted so that Central Park could be built. As yet, permission to excavate is elusive. The project has received National Science Foundation and other grant support. See: www.learn.columbia.edu/seneca_village

PhD from New York University 1975. Began at Barnard in 1981.

Professor Rothschild will teach the graduate course (open to upper-level undergrads) Museum Anthropology, History and Theory, in fall 2007 and V3903, the Ethnoarchaeology of Cities, for undergraduates in the spring of 2008.

Selection Publications

Colonial Encounters in a Native American Landscape: The Spanish and Dutch in North America. Smithsonian Institution Press, 2003.

Labrador Winter: The Ethnographic Journals of William Duncan Strong, 1927-28, edited by Eleanor B. Leacock and Nan A. Rothschild. Smithsonian Press, 1994. (225 pp).

Prehistoric Dimensions of Status: Gender and Age in Eastern North America, Garland Publishing, 1991 (216 pp.).

New York City Neighborhoods: The Eighteenth Century. Academic Press: 1990 (267 pp.). (To be republished 2008, Eliot Werner Publications).

The Research Potential of Anthropological Museum Collections, edited by A.M. Cantwell, J.B. Griffin and N.A. Rothschild. Annals, New York Academy of Sciences, New York: 1981, no. 376 (584 pp.).

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