Dr. J. Daniel Rogers started working at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in 1989. He earned a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. He is Curator Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology. He is well known for his archaeological work with the Spiro Mounds in Oklahoma and other sites in the southeastern United States, and has studied the rise of chiefdoms and empires across the world.
His work has often focused on households as a bridge to understanding the structure of complex societies and the interrelatedness of settlement, subsistence and political systems on a macroscopic scale. He has also done significant research on interpreting the processes of culture contact and colonization at the edges of empires in a variety of areas, including the Great Plains, Central Mexico, the Caribbean, and Inner Asia.
His recent work explores the human impact on the environment. Through National Science Foundation grants, Dr. Rogers and collaborators at George Mason University used agent-based simulations to model the rise and fall of Inner Asian empires and adaptation to extreme weather. The team also explored long-term human impacts on the environment, especially the sustainability and resilience of different social systems.
In addition to his position at the National Museum of Natural History, Dr. Rogers taught anthropology and museum studies at The George Washington University, where he has been an Adjunct Professor from 2003-2016. His courses focus on museum anthropology and the interaction between museums and the public. He was also an Affiliate Professor at George Mason University and has taught the Origins of Social Complexity in the Department of Computational and Data Sciences.
Dr. Rogers' research interests include: Analysis of social change using ethnohistorical, archaeological, and computational methodologies; the social and community role of museums; theories of meaning and the role of the individual; analysis of human interactions with the environment; the rise of states and empires; Inner Asian history and archaeology; analysis of culture contact in the North America Great Plains, the Caribbean, and Central Mexico; technical analysis of ceramics; agent-based computational simulations.
Lotte Govaerts is an archaeology Ph.D. student at the Free University of Brussels (VUB). Her dissertation research involves the analysis of 19th century artifacts from the NMNH’s River Basin Survey collections. In addition to her dissertation research, she is assisting the Rogers Archaeology Lab with cataloging collections and other lab duties.
Lotte has master’s and undergraduate degrees in Archaeology and Art History from the Free University of Brussels (VUB), where she focused on antiquity/classics. Lotte worked as an archaeologist for various institutions in North Carolina from 2004 to 2013, specializing in North American archaeology. Her research interests include historical archaeology, the fur trade, colonization, interactions between people and environment, gender issues, and feminist archaeology.
Lotte enjoys the many museums and restaurants in the DC area. Other non-archaeology interests include languages (dead or alive), travel, and the imaginary worlds of science fiction and fantasy in literature, TV, movies, and video games.
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