Archaeologist Michael Frachetti Promoted

Michael Frachetti (center right in blue suit) talks with colleagues during the party celebrating his promotion to associate professor with tenure.

Anthropology faculty, graduate students, and Arts & Sciences colleagues celebrated the promotion of Michael Frachetti to associate professor with tenure at a party in April 2011.

Frachetti works in Central and Eastern Eurasia on social and economic interactions among pastoral nomadic populations during the Bronze Age, particularly the relationships between pastoral strategies and the environment, and the way choices and ways of life of mobile groups contributed to the formation of wide-reaching networks as early as 2000 BC. He works in Eastern Kazakhstan along the Silk Road, using archaeological and ethnographic methods, as well as remote sensing, spatial analysis, and landscape modeling. This work is published in his 2008 book, Pastoralist Landscapes and Social Interaction in Bronze Age Eurasia, as well as numerous articles; it is also highlighted on his SAIE lab (Spatial Analysis, Interpretation, and Exploration Laboratory) website.

Future research will include a new archaeological field project in the Malguzar Mountains of Eastern Uzbekistan, as well as ethnographic research in Nias Island, Indonesia. In Uzbekistan, the focus of the archaeological study is to trace the ecology and political economy of the earliest known nomadic societies throughout the Inner Asian Mountains and to document the climatic and economic forces that may have affected their growth and proliferation across Eurasia in antiquity. In Indonesia, Frachetti is part of an international team of researchers investigating the impact of natural disasters (tsunamis, etc.) on coastal populations. His specific interest is the use of GIS and satellite imagery to monitor and model social responses to environmental changes such as landcover destruction, coastline loss, and shifting marine ecology on the part of contemporary Indonesian communities. This project applies archaeological methods of data recovery and predictive modeling to ethnographic contexts in which drastic shifts in social and environmental landscapes are evident.