Kenneth G. Kelly, PhD

Like many archaeologists, I first felt the pull of the past as a youngster.  I can't remember when I didn't want to be an archaeologist.  This desire was nurtured as a youth by travel throughout the US and Western Europe, allowing me to visit first hand many interesting historical and archaeological sites.  My initial archaeological fieldwork experience occurred as an undergraduate, when I spent one summer in New Mexico living and working on the Pajarito Plateau northwest of Santa Fe, and another at Mission Soledad in central California.  While an undergraduate at UCLA I found what was for me the perfect mix of history and archaeology - the study of Historical Archaeology.  Being introduced to this field by Professor Merrick Posnansky also kindled my other anthropological passion - African Archaeology. 

 

Since those first courses at UCLA as an undergraduate, I have specialized in Historical Archaeology and the colonial encounter.  My research interests include the archaeological study of culture contact and change, especially as seen in the setting of the African Diaspora, the origin and development of complex societies, and ethnohistory.  I have primarily pursued these interests in West Africa, where I have been involved in or directed archaeological projects in Bénin, Togo, and now Guinea; and in the Caribbean, where I have conducted research in Jamaica, Guadeloupe, and Martinique.  I returned to Bénin in the summer of 1999 with two graduate students from our department to bring my 8-year research project at Savi, Bénin to a close. 

 

In 2001 I began a new research project in Guadeloupe, a French department in the Caribbean.  In 2004 I began two new projects in the Caribbean.  One, with Mark Hauser (Associate Professor, Northwestern University), is a study of ceramic production and distribution in Martinique and Guadeloupe through the use of neutron activation analysis and thin-section petrography.  The other project is an archaeological investigation of a sugar plantation in Martinique, and this developed as a comparison to work I have conducted in Guadeloupe. During the summer of 2005 I led an international team of students working in both Guadeloupe and Martinique. In Guadeloupe, we finished our project at Habitation La Mahaudière, and in Martinique we began a project at Habitation Crève Cœur with a survey and shovel test program to delimit the 18th and 19th century slave village of that estate.

 

In January 2006 I conducted an initial site visit to Guinea, West Africa, where a series of sites exist that are associated with the slave trade to South Carolina. In 2007, 2008, and 2010 I led an international team of 10 students to continue research at Habitation Crève Cœur in Martinique. Since completing the Crève Cœur project in 2010, I have returned my focus to Guinea, where I conducted a preliminary visit in several sites related to the 19th century slave trade along the Rio Pongo.  I led an international research team to these sites in January-April 2013.  Ph.D. student Kelly Goldberg is continuing this project.  In 2016 I returned to the Caribbean, begining a project investigating plantation slavery in Haiti.

 

I taught at USC from 1998 to 2020, having previously taught for two years at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff.  I taught a variety of introductory and advanced courses for undergraduates and graduate students, including Human Evolution, Introduction to Archaeology, Panoramas of Prehistory, Historical Archaeology, and Historical Archaeology Lab, among others.  I have seen fifteen Ph.D. projects to their finish.  I have chaired over twenty MA thesis committees (see them under Graduate Students working with me).  I was the Department Chair of the Anthropology Department from 2014 to 2017, and I was the coordinator of the Historical Archaeology and Cultural Resource Management Graduate Certificate Program.  I have edited or co-edited six books or special journal issues, published over forty-five articles and book chapters, more than sixty book reviews and encyclopedia entries, and have delivered more than 100 papers at professional conferences and symposia. I am the editor of the Current Research in Africa column for the Newsletter of the Society for Historical Archaeology, and serve on the editorial boards of Taboui and the Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage.