Amy Kowal

Biography

Hailing from Buffalo, New York I attended the University of Buffalo and spent a semester as an undergraduate enrolled in courses whose descriptions appealed to me from the course catalog; one among them was Great Sites and Romantic Archaeology. My major changed, I spent my junior and senior years in the Anthropology Department developing an interest in the real story behind human history.

Florida's warmth and multicultural contact brought me to the Anthropology Department at Florida State University. Here I explored the history of the Southeastern United States from the Paleoindian period to the present day. Native Americans, minority populations, and contact situations are the subjects I still find most interesting. American history has always been of interest, now I just research the other side's point of view.

My research and teaching interests include community and cultural heritage, museum studies, sport and culture, historical archaeology, bioarchaeology, race, and ethnicity. My doctoral dissertation research focused on the exhibition of agency of the African American Population at Snee Farm, South Carolina seen through an analysis of the ceramic assemblage of the farm's main house, outbuildings, and slave village. I coauthored The Archaeological Report of the Charles Pinckney National Historic Site with Bennie Keel, a continuation of my dissertation research.

My primary responsibility is as a professor and advisor to undergraduate students here at Florida State University. Trained as a four-field anthropologist at FSU, I teach courses in each subdiscipline, emphasizing the cooperative nature of Anthropology as a humanistic science.

Academic Career: Ph.D. and MA in Anthropology from the Florida State University; BA in Anthropology from the State University of New York at Buffalo

Field of Study – Archaeology, Cultural Anthropology, and Biological Anthropology with interest in:

• Museum Studies
• Historical Archaeology
• Sport and Culture
• Cultural Heritage and Community Studies
• African American Archaeology
• Race and Ethnicity
• FSU International Programs Study Abroad