Donald Smith completed his PhD in Spring 2005. His dissertation was titled, “Carpenter Brook Revisited: Social Context and Early Late Woodland Ceramic Variation in Central New York State.”
As stated in last year’s bio:
I earned my BA in archaeology and history, and a BS in mathematics, from Bridgewater State College in May 1999. More recently, I received my M.A. in anthropology (archaeology) from UB in February 2003. In the summer of 2002 I was the assistant field supervisor at the Old Fort Niagara field school in Youngstown, New York. During the summer of 2004, I completed a survey of the fort, which has resulted in a digital map of the site that will soon be linked to its archaeological database. Also in the summer of 2004, I co-directed an Industrial Archaeology project at the Tifft Nature Preserve in South Buffalo. The project is aimed at introducing high school students to technological applications in archaeology, including GIS, total station surveying, and GPS-related fieldwork. To facilitate this project, I co-wrote and received a $10,000 grant package from the ESRI Non-Profit Grants Program. Finally, since 2003, I have been building a GIS for the The Archaeological Project in Denmark.
In terms of my own academic research, my primary focus is late prehistoric (AD 1000 – 1650) Iroquoian people, their material culture (specifically pottery), and their ideas about the landscape. Although archaeologists cannot directly access the beliefs of individuals from non-literate groups before their contact with Europeans, many of their ideas can be inferred from early post-Contact written documents, such as those of French Jesuits missionaries in southeastern Ontario. My dissertation project is aimed at interpreting the ceramic assemblage from a site in Onondaga County, New York, that was formed as people re-enacted some of their beliefs about certain places in their landscape around AD 1000. To partially fund this research, I received the Robert E. Funk Foundation Memorial Archaeology Foundation Research Grant, offered through the New York State Museum in 2004.