Overview
I am an anthropological archaeologist who specializes in the archaeology of North American Indigenous groups and community-engaged research.
For my dissertation, entitled “The Circulation of Shell and Copper Objects in the circa 1450-1600 Haudenosaunee Homeland,” I explored long-distance exchange networks and associated relationships between Indigenous communities during the period of European exploration and colonization.
Currently, I am leading archaeological fieldwork and artifact analysis for The St. James AME Zion Church Community Excavations. This community-engaged project located in downtown Ithaca, New York uses archaeology as a tool to help the St. James community tell empowering stories of its past. St. James AME Zion Church was built in the 1830s and served as a station on the Underground Railroad; the church continues to remain an active space of worship to this day. For my work with this project, I received the 2023 Cornell Postdoc Achievement Award for Excellence in Community Engagement.
I am also a member of the Sharing and Building Knowledge of Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫˀ Heritage: Places, Ancestors, Belongings project, a collaboration between Cornell-based archaeologists and Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫˀ (Cayuga Haudenosaunee) knowledge holders, aimed at accumulating and synthesizing information on archaeological sites and collections in order to help the community with rematriation.
Previously, I co-led excavations for the White Springs Archaeological Project. White Springs was an Onöndowa’ga:’ (Seneca Haudenosaunee) town occupied from circa 1688 to 1715, located near Geneva, New York. This project, conducted in collaboration with representatives of the Onöndowa’ga:’ descendant community, investigates the impact of warfare on Onöndowa’ga:’ house forms and daily life. I was also previously a member of Dating Iroquoia, a collections-based research project refining radiocarbon chronologies for Northern Iroquoian site sequences.
Research Focus
Anthropological archaeology; American Indian and Indigenous Studies; community-based archaeology; collections management; museum studies; Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) archaeology and history; systems of exchange in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century northeastern North America; settlement patterns; material culture studies; shell bead wampum; copper; radiocarbon dating and chronological modeling
Publications
Sanft, Samantha M.
2021 The Circulation of Shell and Copper Objects in the circa 1450-1600 Haudenosaunee Homeland. Ph.D. Dissertation, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.
Birch, Jennifer, Sturt W. Manning, Samantha Sanft, Megan A. Conger
2021 Refined Radiocarbon Chronologies for Northern Iroquoian Site Sequences: Implications for Coalescence, Conflict, and the Reception of European Goods. American Antiquity 86(1):61-89.
Manning, Sturt W., Jennifer Birch, Megan A. Conger, Samantha Sanft
2020 Resolving Time Among Non-Stratified Short-Duration Contexts on a Radiocarbon Plateau: Possibilities and Challenges from the AD 1480-1630 Example and Northeastern North America. Radiocarbon 62(6):1785-1807.
Samantha M. Sanft
2020 Dating the Circulation of Shell and Copper Beads in the Fifteenth- through Seventeenth-Century Northeast. The SAA Archaeological Record 20(4):62-66.
Manning, Sturt W., Jennifer Birch, Megan A. Conger, Michael W. Dee, Carol Griggs, Carla S. Hadden, Alan G. Hogg, Christopher Bronk Ramsey, Samantha Sanft, Peter Steier, Eva M. Wild
2018 Radiocarbon Re-dating of Contact Era Iroquoian History in Northeastern North America. Science Advances 4(12). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aav0280.
Sanft, Samantha M.
2018 Beads and Pendants from Indian Fort Road: Native Cultural Continuity and Innovation in the Sixteenth Century Haudenosaunee Homeland. Northeast Anthropology 85-86:1-20.