Department of Anthropology
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University of California, Los Angeles
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Jeanne E. Arnold is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She joined the UCLA faculty in1988. She completed her B.A. at the University of Michigan and received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has researched and published extensively on the later prehistory and early Historic period of the American Pacific Coast, focusing on Native American community and household organization, specialized labor and occupations, and the emergence of hierarchical socioeconomic and political relationships in traditional societies. Arnold's archeological field and laboratory research in western North America has been supported principally by the National Science Foundation. Using a variety of survey, surface collection, excavation, and remote sensing strategies, along with paleoenvironmental reconstruction, technological studies, and the like, Arnold and her students and collaborators have analyzed Chumash villages on the Channel Islands of California to provide a window onto daily household life, specialized craft production, exchange relationships, subsistence, and political evolution. Recent archaeological discoveries support the view that the coastal Chumash were among the most complex hunter-gatherer peoples of the world. |
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The Fraser River Valley Project (2002-present) in Southern British Columbia, Canada, is co-directed by Arnold and several colleagues from University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser Univiersity, and the Sto:lo Nation. Investigations of household and community organization in later prehistoric and early contact-era Sto:lo pithouse villages are providing new insights into status, diet, identity and regional interaction. Arnold served for 14 years on the Society for American Archaeology's National Historic Landmarks Committee, preserving the nation's cultural heritage in association with the National Park Service. This work has been acknowledged by the U.S. Department of the Interior. She also serves in a frequent advisory role to California's Channel Islands National Park. Her recent published work includes investigations into the relationship between political power, labor rights, and kinship in traditional societies and explorations of the costs and benefits of participation in hierarchies. Arnold has published several books, most recently Emergent Complexity: The Evolution of Intermediate Societies (1996), The Origins of a Pacific Coast Chiefdom: The Chumash of the Channel Islands (2001), and Foundations of Chumash Complexity (2004).
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CURRENT RESEARCH PROJECTS: |
California Channel Islands Household Archaeology Project (1995-present) link
Island Chumash villagers were maritime peoples, engaged heavily in using the rich faunal resources of the Pacific Ocean. They traded extensively with mainland Chumash neighbors across the Santa Barbara Channel, using their renowned plank canoes. Villagers lived in large, permanent communities along the coasts, and many of them specialized in the manufacture of microdrills or shell beads. Millions of drills and shell beads were made by islanders during the last half-millennium before the arrival of Europeans. Team members began fieldwork on early Historic period Island Chumash households and communities in 1995. Field teams sampled roughly 35 houses at four large Historic village sites on Santa Cruz Island, exploring wealth and social status, participation in craft specializations, and diet in these households. More intensive excavations were carried out at five houses in these villages, with fieldwork concluding in the late 1990s. Arnold’s earlier field research at three Historic-era houses at an island microblade manufacturing village was recently incorporated into this project. Several publications have emerged from this large corpus of data (Arnold and Graesch 2004; Arnold, Ambos, and Larson 1997; Dietler 2003; Graesch 2004; Noah 2005), and analyses are ongoing. Southern British Columbia: The Fraser River Valley Project (2002-present) link A multi-year collaborative field project in southwestern British Columbia with Canadian colleagues and students was conducted during the 2002 to 2006 seasons. Financial support included the UCLA Academic Senate and CIOA Field Research funds. A team of six researchers from UCLA and several researchers from Simon Fraser U., U. of British Columbia, and the Sto:lo Nation tested an early Historic village site along the upper Fraser River Valley: the village of Ts’qó:ls at Hope, B.C., under Arnold’s direction during 2003 and 2005. UCLA team members are focusing on late precontact and early Historic Sto:lo household economic dynamics and villagers’ social and exchange relationships with Sto:lo people (and Europeans) situated along the massive Fraser River system, which extends from deep in the Canadian Plateau to the Gulf of Georgia. UCLA Sloan Center on Everyday Lives of Families (CELF) (2001-present) link The UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families (CELF) project, supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, focuses on the daily lives and material worlds of contemporary middle-class families in the Los Angeles area (link @ http://www.celf.ucla.edu/). Arnold has been a faculty project member since its inception in 2001. She developed the research design and directs the ethnoarchaeology domain of the CELF project, which focuses on the material culture of middle-class families at home, including the physical house and grounds, the possessions of the family, and uses of residential space by families. The material and visual record of life in modern American households captured in CELF databases is unprecedented among modern industrial societies (floor-plan maps, more than 21,000 digital photos of possessions, systematic scan sampling data of domestic uses of space, etc.). The assembled archives allow rapid access to rich spatial and temporal records of working family life, providing for an array of qualitative and quantitative analyses about activities, objects, and time use in the home. Among other topics, Arnold is investigating the crush of household possessions and their distribution within many of the sampled houses, the vanishing leisure time of parents, and the ways family identity is embodied in the home and its artifacts. The article “Changing American Home Life: Trends in Domestic Leisure and Storage among Middle-Class Families” appeared in the Journal of Family and Economic Issues in 2007.Arnold and several co-authors currently are working on a photo-essay book entitled Life at Home in the Twenty-first Century: 32 Families Open Their Doors.
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STUDENTS: Graduate students working with Jeanne Arnold are conducting research in a variety of cultural and geographic settings, primarily in North America. Catherine Bailey, Kelly Fong, Angela Orlando, and John Dietler are currently at various stages of their MA or doctoral projects. Recent Ph.D. recipients (see links) include Mike Hilton (2002), Anna Noah (2005), Anthony Graesch (2006), Ray Corbett (2007), Michael Lenert (2007), and Julie Bernard (2008). Prospective students interested in graduate research on complex hunter-gatherers, political evolution, emergent complexity, the Pacific Coast, specialized craft production systems, and broader North America can contact Prof. Arnold at jearnold@ucla.edu. For general information on the graduate academic anthropology program at UCLA, see the Department of Anthropology website, and for general information regarding grad admissions at UCLA, see the Graduate Division website.
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At the UC Reserve Field Station
on Santa Cruz Island. Pictured (left to right) are: Anthony Graesch, Scott
Pletka, Jeanne Arnold, Karen Sirota, Anna Noah, and Terisa Green.
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