Kent Lightfoot

Kent Lightfoot is Class of 1960 Chair in Undergraduate Education in the Anthropology Department at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as the curator of North American archaeology in the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology and faculty associate at the Archaeological Research Facility. He received his B.A. from Stanford University and his Ph.D. from Arizona State University and has directed archaeological projects in New England, the American Southwest, and along the Pacific Coast of North America. In the last 10 years, he has focused his studies on the impressive shell mounds of the greater San Francisco Bay, the Russian colony of Fort Ross (1812-43) and nearby historic Spanish missions in northern California, and landscape management practices employed by complex hunter-hunters in central California. Lightfoot’s recent books include Indians, Missionaries, and Merchants: The Legacy of Colonial Encounters on the California Frontiers (UC Press) and California Indians and their Environments: An Introduction (with Otis Parrish) (UC Press).