I am a Five College Assistant Professor of Anthropology with a shared faculty appointment among three campuses in the Five Colleges Consortium. My home department is the Department of Anthropology at Smith College, where I am also on the Faculty Advisory Committees for the Archaeology Minor and Latin American Studies. I teach a course each fall semester at Mt. Holyoke College and one each spring at Amherst College. There is a vibrant community of archaeologists in the Five Colleges, including faculty at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Hampshire College. There is also a chapter of the Archaeological Institute of America in Western Massachusetts, which hosts a number of speakers throughout the academic year.
In terms of courses, each fall I teach Introduction to Archaeology at Smith College and I offer some variety of the following courses throughout the school year: Archaeology of Food; Collecting the Past: Art and Artifacts of the Ancient Americas; Archaeological Method, Theory & Practice; Native South Americans; The Inca & the Ancestors. Please contact me if you would like a copy of a syllabus or have questions or comments about the course content. I have also taught an undergraduate and graduate-level archaeological field school at Pukara, Peru (2009 & 2010) and look forward to taking students to the field again in the upcoming years.
Lastly, students interested in pursuing archaeology as a career should contact professional archaeologists in colleges and universities, museums and other cultural institutions, cultural resource management firms (CRM), and government agencies with questions. These professionals can share advice about what types of employment are possible with a BA, MA or PhD and ways to be prepared for those opportunities. I recommend some resources to explore before reaching out with questions.