I want to take the time this year (Happy New Year, by the way) to give readers a sense of the members of the American Antiquity (AAQ) Editorial Board. These dedicated individuals are sorely needed and valuable in terms of aiding me in producing a journal four times a year and helping to guide the direction and mission of AAQ. Going in alphabetical order, this column focuses on Stephen B. Acabado (UCLA), Sabrina C. Agarwal (Berkeley), and Michael L. Blakey (William & Mary).
Stephen B. Acabado received his PhD from the University of Hawai'i in 2010. He is currently an associate professor of anthropology at University of California, Los Angeles, where his research focuses on Southeast Asian agricultural systems and landscape archaeology. He is interested in colonialism, culture contact, and Indigenous empowerment in Southeast Asia. He is a strong advocate for engaged archaeology and collaboration with descendant communities. He is involved with collaborative projects such as the Ifugao Archaeological Project, the Bicol Archaeological Project in the Philippines, and the Taiwan Indigenous Landscape and History Project. He recently published a book, Indigenous Archaeology in the Philippines: Decolonizing Ifugao History, following another the year before (Acabado and Kuan Reference Acabado and Kuan2021; Acabado and Martin Reference Acabado and Martin2022), which highlight his collaboration with the Indigenous Ifugao communities in the Philippines and emphasizes their response and resistance to Spanish colonization.
Sabrina C. Agarwal received her PhD from the University of Toronto. She is a professor of anthropology at University of California, Berkeley, where her research focuses on social identity, gender, sexuality, and inequality in bioarchaeology. She has worked with collections from multiple countries, including the UK, Italy, Turkey, and Japan. She has recently published edited volumes such as Exploring Sex and Gender in Bioarchaeology (Agarwal and Wesp Reference Agarwal and Wesp2017) and Children and Childhood in Bioarchaeology (Beauchesne and Agarwal Reference Beauchesne and Agarwal2018). She is also interested in bioethics of bioarchaeology, particularly the ethics of skeletal conservation and repatriation. She is the co-founder of Bioarchaeology International, as well as a founder of the Western Bioarchaeology Group (WeBiG).
Michael L. Blakey received his PhD from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 1985. He is currently a National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of Anthropology, Africana Studies, and American Studies at the College of William & Mary, where he is also the founding director of the Institute for Historical Biology. He directed the work on the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century African Burial Ground in New York City while a professor of anthropology at Howard University, where he also curated the W. Montague Cobb Collection. He is interested in the bioarchaeology of the African diaspora and the intersections of biology, history, and society. His research highlights past and current forms of anthropological racism. He is an innovator of ethical, publicly engaged archaeology, and he has many recent publications highlighting issues of racism in anthropology (e.g., Blakey Reference Blakey2020a, Reference Blakey2020b).
