Anthropology

Areas of Interest

Mark Agostini grew up in the town of Medfield, Massachusetts and from early age became interested in archaeology and anthropology. He attended the University of Vermont, Burlington as an undergraduate majoring in Anthropology and Film. While there he became interested in archaeology of the American Southwest. Through the support of an NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Fellowship, he completed an honors thesis exploring shifts in pottery traditions and communities of practice at sites in the Silver Creek region of East-Central Arizona. He later worked at the Abbe Museum (Smithsonian Affiliate) in Bar Harbor, Maine and Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in Cortez, CO as an archaeology intern, and as a ceramics lab manager at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University. In 2016, he entered the Anthropological Archaeology PhD program at Brown University and since then has focused on methods of ceramic analysis like archaeometry and petrography while adopting new and less invasive approaches like LiDAR analysis, and surface artifact surveys of archaeological sites. His dissertation project is a collaborative archaeology partnership with the Pueblo of San Ildefonso, which aims to address questions concerning the modern Pueblo’s archaeological and ethnographic ties to their earliest ancestral sites atop the Pajarito Plateau and in the Rio Grande Valley (1300 – 1600 CE). Among his recent honors are the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) Fred Plog Memorial Fellowship (2021), Matthew Tobin Cappetta Scholarship (2021, SAA), Julian D. Hayden Paper Prize (2020, Arizona Archaeological and Historical Society), Watson Smith Paper Award (2020, Brown University), Student Poster Award (2018, SAA).

Previous Degrees

• B.A. in Anthropology with a focus in Archaeology from University of Vermont
• M.A. in Anthropology from Brown University (2018)