Dr Craig N Cipolla

Lecturer in Historical Archaeology

BA (UMass Boston), MA (UMass Boston), Ph.D. (University of Pennsylvania)

Tel. No. +44 (0)116 2522640

Email: cc363@le.ac.uk 

Craig Cipolla is an anthropologically trained historical archaeologist. He earned a BA in Anthropology in 2003 and an MA in Historical Archaeology in 2005, both from the University of Massachusetts Boston. For his MA research he used faunal analysis to explore nineteenth-century Native American foodways and reservation life in Connecticut. In 2010, he finished a PhD in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. His doctoral research focused on the Brothertown Indians, a multi-tribal Christian community that originated on the East Coast, relocated to central New York State in the late eighteenth century, and moved once again to current-day Wisconsin in the nineteenth century. He analyzed shifts in mortuary material culture, settlement patterns, and writing in order to reconstruct the processes by which factions of several tribal groups converged to form a new type of Native community, fusing together Algonquian, Iroquoian, and European cultural traditions.

Before joining the School of Archaeology & Ancient History at the University of Leicester he served as an Adjunct Instructor at both the University of Massachusetts Boston and the University of Connecticut, and as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology & Sociology at Lafayette College.

Research Interests

Craig’s research interests include: Archaeological Method & Theory, Native North America, Comparative Colonialism, Historical Archaeology & Anthropology, Social Archaeology, Indigenous & Collaborative Archaeologies, Faunal Analysis & Foodways, Multi-Sited Analysis, Discourse Analysis, and Postcolonial & Practice Theories. 

His work explores the complex cultural interactions associated with European colonialism in northeastern and midwestern North America. As Native American communities responded to colonialism and its outgrowths, they selectively appropriated European-introduced practices and material while simultaneously redefining and transforming traditional modes of subsistence, social organization, and belief. Craig’s work reconstructs these processes of entanglement through analysis of archaeological, written, and spoken records, focusing specifically on the ways in which Native communities survived colonialism and made their places in the modern world. In pursuing these ends, Craig also strives to create new means of collaborating with descendant communities and other stakeholding publics, making the archaeological process more visible and relevant to those outside of academia while maintaining academic rigor.

Craig recently finished the first stage of his ongoing collaborative research project with the Brothertown Indian Nation of Wisconsin. He is also the director of an annual archaeological field school on the Mohegan Reservation in Connecticut. He and his collaborators at Mohegan plan to develop the project into a University of Leicester field school that will eventually bring Native American, English, and American students together to collaboratively study Mohegan-English interactions in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

Select Publications

2013 - Becoming Brothertown: Native American Ethnogenesis and Endurance in the Modern World. University of Arizona Press, in press.

2013 - Resituating Homeland: Motion, Movement, and Ethnogenesis at Brothertown, in Mary C. Beaudry and Travis G. Parno (eds.), Archaeologies of Mobility and Movement, Springer Press, pp. 117-132.

2012 - Textual Artifacts, Artifactual Texts: An Historical Archaeology of Brothertown Writing. Historical Archaeology 46(2):91-109.

2012 - Peopling the Place, Placing the People: An Archaeology of Brothertown Discourse. Ethnohistory 59(1): 51-78. 

2011 - Commemoration, Community, and Colonial Politics at Brothertown. Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology 36(2):145-172.

2008 - Signs of Identity, Signs of Memory. Archaeological Dialogues 15(2):196-215.

2008 - (co-authored with Robert W. Preucel) Indigenous and Postcolonial Archaeologies, in Matthew Liebmann and Uzma Z. Rizvi, (eds), Archaeology and the Postcolonial Critique, Altamira Press, pp. 129-140.