Dr. Lopinot will provide an overview of archaeological and archaeobotanical evidence related to changing human-plant relationships, particularly as they pertain to the development of farming. He will focus on evidence from prehistoric Native American sites located in the lower Missouri River and central Mississippi River basins, touching now and then on evidence from the Ozarks.

Lopinot, Neal H. (PhD)

Neal H. Lopinot is Director of the Center for Archaeological Research and a Research Professor at MSU. He has authored or coauthored publications in such journals as American Antiquity, Geoarchaeology, Journal of Archaeological Science, Journal of Geology, Journal of Caribbean Archaeology, Plains Anthropologist, Southeastern Archaeology, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He has also published articles in a number of edited books, including Foraging and Farming in the Eastern Woodlands (1993), Cahokia: Domination and Ideology in the Mississippian World (1997), and Hunter and Gatherer Lifeways of the Early Holocene (2010). Since 2006, he has served as secretary of the Missouri Archaeological Society and as editor of the Missouri Archaeological Society Quarterly and The Missouri Archaeologist. His major research interests include archaeobotany, cultural resource management, experimental archaeology, and early hunter-gatherer behavior. During the past quarter-century, he has also developed considerable interest in many aspects of colonial archaeology, an interest manifested by ongoing research in Trinidad and Tobago.

Dr. Andrea A. Hunter is an enrolled member of the Osage Nation from the Grayhorse District and an active participant in the dances. Both of Dr. Hunter’s grandfathers, Joseph Cannon and Arthur A. Hunter are full-blood Osage. Hunter received a BA in anthropology from the University of Colorado-Boulder, and an MA and PhD in anthropology from the University of Missouri-Columbia. Dr. Hunter was the first Native American in the United States to receive a Ph.D. in anthropology with an expertise in archaeology. After seventeen years as a professor in the Department of Anthropology and director of the North American Division of the Laboratory of Paleoethnobotany at Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, Dr. Hunter was honored to accept the position of Director and Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Osage Nation in 2007. Dr. Hunter also served as the vice-chair for 10 years and chair for 10 years of the Smithsonian Institution’s Native American Repatriation Review Committee and during the same period was appointed a Research Associate at the National Museum of Natural History, Washington, D.C.