Overview
Sully Howard joined the Ph.D. program after receiving her B.A. in Archaeology at Barnard College. In her thesis research, Sully worked with Picurís Pueblo– an Indigenous community in Northern New Mexico– where the primary goal of the project was archival: at the request of the community, she produced a written record of significant places, place-names, and place-based traditions. She combined photographs of shrines, documentation of landscape features, transcribed conversations with Picurís elders, maps of key locations, and a collection of drawings of important places in the Picurís landscape.
In this way, Sully’s work illustrates a methodological intersection between archaeology and ethnography and engages in questions surrounding landscapes, memory, materiality, and placemaking. Going forward, her research will continue to combine archaeological and ethnographic methods to examine the theoretical nodes of landscape archaeology and visual culture studies. She intends to concentrate on the archaeology of extreme weather in the South-East United States, entering into conversations surrounding the Anthropocene and climate change. Sully’s research continues to take on matters of memory and materiality by working directly with communities. She seeks to answer how people make a claim to a landscape based on their visual readings of landforms; or, more specifically, how the grounds for such a claim might shift when a landscape suddenly becomes unfamiliar.