Faculty Member

Wendy Ashmore
(Professor, Ph.D. 1981 University of Pennsylvania)
Office: 1229 Watkins Hall
Phone: (951) 827-3935
E-mail: wendy.ashmore@ucr.edu

Professor Ashmore's interests center on the social use and understanding of space. Since the mid-1970s, she has studied the architecture and settlement patterns of the ancient Maya and neighboring peoples, through archaeological field research in Guatemala, Honduras and Belize. Her consideration of the social and symbolic aspects of spatial organization has been expressed in the archaeology of households, the analysis of civic planning in cities and towns, and the study of ancient landscapes. Most recently, she has turned attention to how gender affects and is affected by architecture and other kinds of spatial order. She has completed a monograph on settlement and landscape at the Maya center of Quiriguá, Guatemala, and is developing a book on Ancient Maya Space. She continues writing on ancient civic planning, on social memory at Quiriguá, on social and political contexts of Xunantunich, Belize, and on gender in landscapes.

Selected Publications:

BOOKS: Settlement Archaeology at Quiriguá, Guatemala (2007); Integrating the Diversity of 21st-Century Anthropology: The Life and Intellectual Legacies of Susan Kent (edited with Marcia-Anne Dobres, Sarah Milledge Nelson, and Arlene Rosen, 2006); Discovering Our Past: A Brief Introduction to Archaeology, 4th ed. (with Robert J. Sharer, 2006); Archaeology: Discovering Our Past, 3rd ed. (with Robert J. Sharer, 2003); Archaeologies of Landscape: Contemporary Perspectives (edited with A. Bernard Knapp, 1999); Household and Community in the Mesoamerican Past (edited with Richard Wilk, 1988); Lowland Maya Settlement Patterns (editor, 1981)

ARTICLES AND CHAPTERS: Legacies of Gordon Willey's Belize Valley Research (2007); Building Social History at Pueblo Bonito: Footnotes to a Biography of Place (2007); Gender and Landscapes (in The Handbook of Gender in Archaeology, 2006); The Idea of a Maya Town, in Structure and Meaning in Human Settlement (edited by Tony Atkin and Joseph Rykwert, 2005); Social Archaeologies of Landscape, in A Companion to Social Archaeology (edited by Lynn Meskell and Robert W. Preucel, 2004); Classic Maya Landscapes and Settlement, in Mesoamerican Archaeology: Theory and Practice (edited by Julia A. Hendon and Rosemary A. Joyce, 2004); Ancient Maya Landscapes, in Maya Archaeology at the Millennium (edited by Chares W. Golden and Greg Borgstede, 2004); Commoner Sense: Late and Terminal Classic Social Strategies in the Xunantunich Area (with Jason Yaeger and Cynthia Robin) in The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands: Collapse, Transition, and Transformation (edited by Arthur A. Demarest, Prudence M. Rice, and Don S. Rice, 2004); Xunantunich in a Belize Valley Context (with Richard M. Leventhal), in The Ancient Maya of the Belize Valley: Half a Century of Archaeological Research (edited by James Garber, 2004); On Theory in Maya Settlement Archaeology, in Perspectives on Ancient Maya Rural Complexity (edited by Gyles Iannone and Samuel V. Connell, 2003); "Decisions and Dispositions": Socializing Spatial Archaeology, American Anthropologist (2002); Spatial Order in Maya Civic Plans (with Jeremy A. Sabloff), Latin American Antiquity (2002); Dating the Rise and Fall of Xunantunich: A Late and Terminal Classic Maya Center (with Lisa J. LeCount, Jason Yaeger, and Richard M. Leventhal), Ancient Mesoamerica (2002); Encountering Ancient Maya Women, in Ancient Maya Women (edited by Traci Ardren, 2002); An Aspect of Archaeology's Recent Past and Its Importance in the New Millennium (with Jeremy A. Sabloff), in Archaeology at the Millennium: A Sourcebook (edited by Gary M. Feinman and T. Douglas Price, 2001); Monumentos Políticos: Sitios, Asentamiento, y Paisaje por Xunantunich, Belice, in Anatomia de una civilización: Aproximaciones Interdisciplinarias a la Cultura Maya (edited by Andrés Ciudad Ruiz, and others, 1998); Site Planning Principles and Concepts of Directionality among the Ancient Maya, Latin American Antiquity (1991).