Charlotte Sunseri

Chair and Professor Ph.D. UC Santa Cruz, 2009

Expertise:
Historical archaeology, economic anthropology, zooarchaeology, spatial analysis, quantitative methods

Office Hours: 

• Tuesdays from 9:00 - 11:00am via Zoom
• Thursdays from 12:30 - 1:30pm in-person (Clark Hall 469)

Clark Hall 469C
408-924-5713
Charlotte.Sunseri@agmjbl.com

Charlotte Sunseri is a Professor of Anthropology and serves as the Chair of the Department of Anthropology. Her work as an historical archaeologist focuses on social identity, industry and labor, household economic choices and cultural landscapes. She examines histories of racialized and gendered labor practices and the rise of class-consciousness in the American West, particularly in settings of paternalistic corporate control and “welfare capitalism” social reform ideals. Her current project explores the experiences of workers in the company town of New Almaden, California (1851-1917, now Almaden Quicksilver County Park of Santa Clara) to consider how workers negotiated, accommodated, or resisted capitalist structures in a setting that was socially engineered for control over them and the products of their labor. This New Almaden Workers’ Heritage Project (2020-ongoing) explores power and identity in capitalism along with health and well-being in toxic industrial settings. Prior to this, the Mono Mills Archaeological Project (2011-2020), a collaboration with the Mono Lake Kutzadika’a Paiute Tribe, investigated the intertwining of labor, power, and identity in a late nineteenth century milling community of the eastern Sierra Nevada. Dr. Sunseri's dissertation research of Native California coastal groups focused on the emergence of social inequality along the Monterey Bay and investigated indigenous economic organization prior to colonization using zooarchaeological and spatial analyses. 

Professor Sunseri authored the book Alliance Rises in the West: Labor, Race, and Solidarity in Industrial California (2020 University of Nebraska Press), peer-reviewed chapters and journal articles, and numerous technical reports. She has worked as a professional archaeologist in the San Francisco Bay area and at sites throughout California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Texas, Missouri, Illinois, and Mali, West Africa. 

Professor Sunseri has taught a range of undergraduate and graduate courses since joining the Department of Anthropology in 2011. Before joining 菠菜网lol正规平台, Dr. Sunseri taught courses at the University of California, Berkeley, San Francisco State University, and the University of California, Santa Cruz where she received an award in recognition of her teaching. Professor Sunseri received the College of Social Sciences’ Teaching Excellence Award in 2017 and was named 菠菜网lol正规平台’s Outstanding Professor in 2020.

Select Publications

2025 “Going Into Labor: Native Women and Participation in Capitalism in the American West,” Historical Archaeology Vol. 59(4).

2024 “Archaeologies of Company Towns and their Landscapes of Power,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology (2024). http://doi.org/10.1007/s10761-024-00767-1

2020 Alliance Rises in the West: Labor, Race, and Solidarity in Industrial California. University of Nebraska Press. Series “Historical Archaeology of the American West.”

2020 “Archaeologies of Working-class Culture and Collective Action,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 24(2020): 183-202. 

2020 “Meat Economies of the Chinese-American West,” In Chinese Diaspora Archeology, Chelsea Rose, Ryan Kennedy (eds.), University of Florida Press.

2017 “Capitalism as Nineteenth-Century Colonialism and Its Impacts on Native Californians,” Ethnohistory 64(4):473-497.

2015 “Taphonomic and Metric Evidence for Marrow and Grease Production,” Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology 35(2): 275-290.

2015 "Food Politics of Alliance in a California Frontier Chinatown," International Journal of Historical Archaeology 19(2): 416-431.

2015 “Alliance Strategies in the Racialized Railroad Economies of the Mining Frontier,” Historical Archaeology 49(1): 85-99.

2014 “Pelts and Provisions: Faunal Remains and the Emergence of Social Inequality in Central Coastal California,” In Animals and Inequality in the Ancient World, Benjamin S. Arbuckle, Sue Ann McCarty (eds.), University of Colorado Press. Pp. 167-188.