All anthropologists, Christopher Rodning, Marcello Canuto, Tatsuya Murakami, and Jason Nesbitt engaged in collaborative retreats at A Studio in the Woods to explore and exchange ideas about the archaeology of monuments within cultural landscapes in the ancient Americas in both 2017 and 2019.

Professor Rodning received his A.B. in anthropology from Harvard University in 1994, and his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2004. His interests as an archaeologist include relationships between people and place as they are manifested in monuments, mortuary practices, architecture and the built environment, and settlement patterns. Several recent and current projects concentrate on cases of culture contact and colonialism, and, particularly, encounters and entanglements between Native Americans and European explorers and colonists in western North Carolina and elsewhere in eastern North America. Professor Rodning teaches courses on North American archaeology, culture contact and colonialism, and the archaeology of cultural landscapes.