Cathy Cameron

  • Professor
  • (PH.D.
  • U. OF ARIZONA
  • 1991)

I am an archaeologist working in the American Southwest and have focused especially on the Chaco Phenomenon. I have worked in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, in northeastern Arizona and currently work in SE Utah. I conducted excavations at the Bluff Great House site in Bluff, Utah as part of the University of Colorado field school. Chaco and After in the Northern San Juan: Excavations at the Bluff Great House was published by the University of Arizona Press in 2009. I have also overseen projects in the Comb Wash area of SE Utah undertaken by the Bureau of Land Management. I have long-term interests in prehistoric population dynamics and especially processes of abandonment and migration and have published books and articles on these processes in the Southwest and elsewhere (see publications). Currently I study a particular type of migrant - captives. An edited volume Invisible Citizens: Captives and Their Consequences was published by the University of Utah Press in 2008 and an article "Captives and Culture Change: Implications for Archaeologists" was published by Current Anthropology in 2011. During my sabbatical (2010-2011) I was a Weatherhead Fellow at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe writing a book on captives in prehistory.

Selected Publications:

  • 2022.  Cameron, Catherine M.  Captives:  The Invisible Migrant.  In Homo Migrans: Modeling Mobility and Migration in Human History, edited by Megan Daniels.  IEMA Proceedings, State University of New York Press. 

  • 2022.  Gutierrez, Gerardo and Catherine M. Cameron. Not Just Disease:  Ideology of Risk and Indigenous Population Decline in North America.  Economic Anthropology (The Symposium) 9:155-157.

  • 2019.  Cameron, Catherine M.  Beyond Trade and Exchange: A New Look at Diffusion.  In Interaction and Connectivity in the Greater Southwest, edited by Karen Harry and Barbara Roth, University Press of Colorado, Boulder

  • 2019.  Ellyson, Laura, Timothy Kohler, and Catherine M. Cameron How Far from Chaco to Oraibi? Quantifying Inequality among Pueblo Households.  Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 55:1 – 14. 

  • 2018.  Lenski, Noel and Catherine M.  Cameron, editors.   What is a Slave Society: The Practice of Slavery in Global Perspective.   Cambridge University Press.

  • 2018 - CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

  • 2016.  Cameron, Catherine M.  Captives:  How Stolen People Changed the World.  University of Nebraska Press. 

  • 2015.  Catherine M. Cameron, Paul Kelton, and Alan Swedlund, editors.  Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America, University of Arizona Press, Tucson.

  • 2016 - CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

  • 2016 - Winner Gordon R. Willey Prize, American Anthropological Association

  • 2013.  Cameron, Catherine M. How People Moved Among Ancient Societies: Broadening the View.American Anthropologist 115 (2):218-231. 

  • 2011.  Cameron, Catherine M. Captives and Culture Change:  Implications for Archaeologists.  Current  Anthropology 52(2):169-209.

  • 2011. Ortman, Scott G. and Catherine M. Cameron. A Framework for Controlled Comparisons of Ancient Southwestern Movement. In Movement, Connectivity, and Landscape Change in the Ancient Southwest, edited by Margaret Nelson and Colleen Strawhacker,pp. 233-252. University Press of Colorado.
  • 2010.  Advances in Understanding the Thirteenth Century Depopulation of the Northern Southwest. In Leaving Mesa Verde: Peril and Change in the Thirteenth Century Southwest, edited by Timothy A. Kohler, Mark D. Varien, and Aaron M. Wright,pp. 346-364. University of Arizona Press.
  • 2009. Chaco and After in the Northern San Juan: Excavations at the Bluff Great House. University of Arizona Press.
  • 2008 .Catherine M. Cameron, editor.  Invisible Citizens: Captives and their Consequences.  University of Utah Press.
  • 2008. Cameron, Catherine M. and Andrew Duff.  History and Process in Village Formation: Context and  Contrasts from the Northern Southwest. American Antiquity 73(1). 
  • 2008. Comparing Great House Architecture: Perspectives from the Bluff Great House.  In Salmon Ruins: Chacoan Outlier and Thirteenth-Century Pueblo in the Middle San Juan Region, edited by Paul Reed,pp. 251-272. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake.
  • 2007. Cameron, Catherine M. and Phil Geib. Earthen Architecture at a Chacoan Great House. Journal of Field Archaeology 32:1-14.