Contact Name

Amanda J Staley Harrison

Contact Phone

573-882-3573

Contact Email

harrisonaj@missouri.edu

Speaker(s) Information

Dr. Wes Stoner is an Associate Professor in MU's Department of Anthropology. He is an anthropological archaeologist interested in economic production and exchange and urbanism in ancient complex societies. Dr. Stoner approaches those topics through a three-fold methodology. First and foremost, is his broad training in anthropological theory and archaeological field methods. He has done extensive survey and excavation in Mexico and parts of the US. Second, the materials gathered from those field projects provide the basis for specialized laboratory analyses. In particular, Dr. Stoner focuses on the production and exchange of ceramics as a way to investigate interaction networks. Ceramics are a flexible medium capable of expressing complex information to the viewer, including religious iconography, aspects of identity, and economic production and exchange. Chemical and petrographic analysis of ceramics can be used to determine their source, the regions in which they were produced, which can be used to identify ancient trade relationships. Third, Dr. Stoner has recently become more involved in remote sensing archaeological features using LiDAR and multispectral satellite imagery. This is a way to quickly generate large databases that would take decades of fieldwork to achieve.