The Archaeological Research Center at UCSC welcomes

Dr. Tsim Schneider as a new Assistant Professor in the Archaeology Department at UCSC!

Professor Schneider’s research interests include California archaeology, culture contact and colonialism, Spanish missions, resistance and refuge, borderlands, landscapes and place, social memory, lithics, and indigenous archaeology. Building from his personal connection to Marin County and his long-standing research interests in the area and time-period, his doctoral dissertation examined Spanish missions in the San Francisco Bay area with an eye to the hinterland landscapes where Native people sought refuge from the missions. He argues that some prehistoric sites thought to have been abandoned at contact were in fact reused by Native people during and after the missions as places of identity and social continuity.

Working closely with the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, land owners, and research colleagues, Professor Schneider is now conducting archaeological excavations at Tomales Bay, California and the site of a post-mission Native American community once involved in the hide and tallow trade. Seeking to evaluate social innovation as well as the protracted histories of hunting, gathering, and other practices during colonial times, this funded project will incorporate EDXRF analysis of obsidian to track mobility and social connectedness and stable isotope analysis of shellfish remains to evaluate the seasonal occupations. Dr. Schneider is also developing a second project using archaeology, ethnohistory, visual heritage, and oral history to understand late-1800s/early 1900s Coast Miwok communities and maritime resource collecting at Tomales Bay.

Dr. Schneider received a B.A. and M.A. in anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin and a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley. He was a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow from 2013 to 2015.