KATHLEEN L. HULL

Professor emerita, Anthropology & Heritage Studies

School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts

• the practice and significance of ritual performance within small-scale societies, especially with respect to community-building;
• the cultural and demographic impact of colonial encounters on native people of North America and the process of European colonialism within native communities more generally; and
• the interplay of demography and culture, with particular emphasis on small-scale, hunting and gathering societies.

All of these themes build on my interest in the interplay of history, contingency, and process in anthropological analysis and, especially, in the integration of theory and method in archaeological explanation. My research uses a holistic approach that combines original archaeological field research, study of museum collections, analysis of native oral  tradition, library research of ethnohistoric sources, and examination of historical visual archives. Such an approach is particularly suited to my work in Yosemite given the rich ethnographic, ethnohistoric, and historical photographic record of the native people in this region.

Check out this video on Adaptable Societies I participated in as part of the Sustainable California series on UCTV!