Diane Gifford-Gonzalez

Biosketch

Diane Gifford-Gonzalez is Distinguished Research Professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She received her B.A. in primate behavior and evolution and her M.A. and Ph.D. in archaeology from the University of California, Berkeley. She undertook postdoctoral study at the University of Arizona’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. She has served as President of the Society of Africanist Archaeologists and the Society for American Archaeology (SAA), and on governing boards of those societies, that of the International Conference of Archaeozoology, the Archaeology Division of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), and the AAA’s Long-Range Planning Committee, as well as the Academic Advisory Council of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. She helped create a SAA scholarship program to support recruiting historically underrepresented students into archaeology. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a Member of the National Academy of Sciences. She has given graduate seminars in Argentina, Kenya, Norway, and China. She received teaching awards from the University of California, Santa Cruz Alumni Association, and the University of California, Santa Cruz Academic Senate’s Committee on Teaching.

Research Interests

Gifford-Gonzalez specializes in zooarchaeology, which uses animal remains to gain insights into the deep history of humans and animals. She has researched early domestic animals in Africa and the emergence and spread of distinctively African herding societies. More recently, she researched historic ecology, Indigenous foodways, and land management in the Monterey Bay region of California in collaboration with the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band. Widely cited articles engage with the nature of analogical inference in archaeology, animal disease barriers to the spread of livestock in Sub-Saharan Africa, and methods for reading culturally structured refuse disposal practices implicit in archaeological deposits. She has done fieldwork in California, Nevada, New Mexico, the Netherlands, Kenya, and Tanzania