Matthew Rowe '07

Matt Rowe at Paint Rock V, a rock shelter in Wyoming that is tightly associated with late paleoindians in the Bighorn Basin in the process of profiling the stratigraphy in the rock shelter. He is sitting in the 8-9,000 year old layers.

Curatorial Assistant Stanley J. Olsen Zooarchaeology Laboratory, Arizona State Museum,

Lecturer, School of Anthropology, University of Arizona

After his USM graduation, Matt enrolled in the Anthropology graduate program at Indiana University, and was awarded a PhD in July of 2014. While at Indiana University, he managed the William R. Adams Zooarchaeology laboratory, which houses a historic zooarchaeology comparative collection containing over 10,000 skeletal specimens. While he served as the laboratory manager, he collaborated with the IU Paleontology Collection and the IU Botanical Collection and submitted a successful NSF Biological Research Collections Improvement Grant (NSF #846697) for nearly $500,000 to upgrade curation conditions for each of the collections. This allowed for renovations the laboratory by installing high-density, mobile shelving, greatly expanding the curation capacity, purchased acid-free boxes for the collection, and hiring students to move, rehouse, and document the entire collection.

Matt’s research focuses on human environment interactions in the early-middle Holocene, through the lens of zooarchaeology. His dissertation research combined Geoarchaeology and Zooarchaeology to understand better, late Paleoindian rockshelter use in the Bighorn Mountains, Wyoming. More recently, he served as Co-Director of a collaborative project with the Crow THPO to prepare a district level nomination to the National Register of Historic Places for the Grapevine Creek buffalo-hunting complex near Ft. Smith, Montana. The project integrated archaeological research with intensive training for Crow tribal monitors. A $40,000 Heritage Preservation Grant from the National Park Service funded this project, and in 2017, a report of the investigation was published in American Antiquity 82:1.

He has taught numerous field schools in the Bighorn Basin, Wyoming, including several collaborative training programs with the Crow and Northern Cheyenne tribes, classes at Indiana University, Indiana-University-Perdue-University-Indianapolis (IUPUI), Northwest College in Wyoming, and has been at the University of Arizona since the fall of 2015. Currently, he is managing the Stanley J. Olsen Zooarchaeology Laboratory in the Arizona State Museum’s Research Division where they have begun a volunteer driven analysis of fauna from the ancestral Hopi site, Homol’ovi, in Northern Arizona. While at the University of Arizona, Matt has taught ANTH160D2: The Origins of Human Diversity, ANTH160A1: Patterns in Prehistory, ANTH332: Environmental Archaeology, and ANTH472: Introduction to Zooarchaeology and Taphonomy.