The New York State Museum maintains its extensive material collections for the benefit of individuals and communities across the New York region and beyond. Increasingly, indigenous scholars, artists, and community members are accessing the NYSM's anthropology collections for insights into...
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Native American Archaeology
Native Americans have been present in New York for 13,000 years. Since the mid-19th century, the New York State Museum has conducted archaeological investigations that have helped to write the histories of Native Americans in the state. The Museum continues that tradition today through field- and collections-based research. Current research is aimed at increasing our understandings of the earliest Native American occupants of New York, between 13,000 and 10,000 years ago; the histories of various agricultural crops and the evolution of agricultural systems some 3,000 to 500 years ago; the ways in which Native American groups settled the landscape and how settlements changed through time 3,000 to 500 years ago; and the ways in which different Native American groups interacted with one another through trade, exchange, and symbolism.
Dr. Jonathan Lothrop
Curator of Archaeology
My research is focused on how and when Native Americans colonized and then settled the New York region from near the end of the Pleistocene or Ice Age into the early Holocene, between about 11,000 and 8000 B.C. This approach involves integrated studies of Paleoindian sites and artifact...Read more
My Research Projects
Dr. Christina Rieth
State Archaeologist and Co-Director, Cultural Resource Survey Program
My research focuses on the ways that prehistoric groups interacted with their local environment and the role that such interaction had on the settlement and subsistence strategies of New York’s Late Prehistoric (A.D. 700-1450) occupants. The relationship between humans and their natural and...Read more
Dr. Penelope B. Drooker - Curator of Anthropology Emerita
News Articles
November is Native American Heritage Month!
Join the NYSM as we celebrate and honor the cultural heritage, diverse histories, and continuing contributions of Native People.
The New York State Museum is a program of the University of the State of New York
New York State Education Department