Mary C. Stiner

Biosketch

Mary C. Stiner is Regents’ Professor (Emeritus as of 2025) in the School of Anthropology at the University of Arizona, and Curator of Zooarchaeology at the Arizona State Museum in Tucson, AZ. She earned B.A. and B.F.A. degrees in Anthropology and Fine Arts, respectively, in 1980 from the University of Delaware, and her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of New Mexico in 1990 with a specialization in archaeology. Her book, Honor among Thieves: A Zooarchaeological Study of Neandertal Ecology (1994, Princeton University Press), won the first Society of American Archaeology (SAA) book prize in 1996. She has conducted archaeological fieldwork at Paleolithic sites in Italy, Israel, Greece, Turkey, Portugal, Serbia, Morocco, and France, and at early Neolithic sites in Turkey. She held a Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professorship at University College London in 2010. She was awarded the SAA Fryxell Award for Interdisciplinary Studies in 2021, and she was inducted to the National Academy of Sciences, Section 51, in 2025. In addition to a career in archaeology and paleoanthropology, she is a practicing artist (painter and sculptor) and a life-long student of nature.

Research Interests

Mary C. Stiner’s research interests center on co-evolutionary processes that involve Paleolithic humans, including predator-predator competition and guild dynamics, predator-prey systems, evolving mutualisms, animal domestication, and niche construction. She works at multiple theoretical and analytical scales with attention to ways of connecting them rigorously in paleoanthropological research. Her geographic focus is the Mediterranean Basin, a hub of three continents and crossroads for numerous biological exchanges during the Pleistocene and Holocene. Her main areas of technical expertise are zooarchaeology, taphonomy (including bone diagenesis), and the biological and mechanical processes by which archaeological sites form. With these and other methods she has addressed long-standing questions about the evolution of hunter-gatherer economics and cooperative labor systems, demography, and symbolic behavior during the Middle and Late Pleistocene. Her research has expanded in recent years to the forager-farmer transition of the early Holocene in Anatolia, where she studies the processes of Neolithic village formation and animal domestication.