Ruth Van Dyke Associate Professor of Anthropology
PhD, University of Arizona, 1998
Archaeologist
rvandyke@binghamton.edu
607-777-2100
Science 1, Room 110B
Personal home page: http://bingweb.binghamton.edu/~rvandyke/Home.html
Ruth Van Dyke is an archaeologist specializing in the North American Southwest, specifically Chaco Canyon and the Four Corners region. Her research interests include landscape, architecture, power, memory, phenomenology and visual representation. Her current fieldwork investigates social, visual and political relationships among Chacoan outlier communities in northwest New Mexico.
2010 Desert Island Books. Assemblage, the Sheffield Graduate Journal of Archaeology. Online at http://www.assemblage.group.shef.ac.uk, December 12, 2010.
2009 Chaco Reloaded: Discursive Social Memory on the Post-Chacoan Landscape. Journal of Social Archaeology 9(2):220-248.
2008 Temporal Scale and Qualitative Social Transformation at Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 18(1):70-78.
2007 The Chaco Experience: Landscape and Ideology at the Center Place. School of Advanced Research Press, Santa Fe.
2006 Chaco's Beginnings, by Richard H. Wilshusen and Ruth M. Van Dyke. In The Archaeology of Chaco Canyon: An Eleventh-Century Pueblo Regional Center, edited by Stephen H. Lekson, pp. 211-259. School of American Research Press, Santa Fe.
2004 Chaco's Sacred Geography. In In Search of Chaco Canyon: New Approaches to an Archaeological Enigma, edited by David Grant Noble, pp. 78-85. School of American Research Press, Santa Fe.
2004 Memory, Meaning, and Masonry: The Late Bonito Chacoan Landscape. American Antiquity 69(3):413-431.
2003 Archaeologies of Memory, edited by Ruth M. Van Dyke and Susan E. Alcock. Blackwell Publishers, Oxford and Malden, Mass.
2000 Chacoan Ritual Landscapes: The View from the Red Mesa Valley. In Great House Communities across the Chacoan Landscape, edited by John Kantner and Nancy Mahoney, pages 91-100. Anthropological Papers of the University of Arizona 65, University of Arizona Press, Tucson.
1999 The Chaco Connection: Evaluating Bonito Style Architecture in Outlier Communities. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 18(4):471-506.
She published three book chapters and one book review (two additional book chapters are in press expected in summer 2012):
Windes, Thomas C. and Ruth M. Van Dyke (2012) Pueblo I Settlement in the Chaco Basin, by Thomas C. Windes and Ruth M. Van Dyke. In Crucible of Pueblos: The Early Pueblo Period in the Northern Southwest, edited by Richard Wilshusen, Gregson Schachner, and James Allison, Cotsen Institute Press, University of California, Los Angeles.
Van Dyke, Ruth M. (2011) Ideology and Social Memory. In Ideologies in Archaeology, edited by Reinhard Bernbeck and Randall H. McGuire, pp. 233-253. University of Arizona Press, Tucson.
Van Dyke, Ruth M. (2011) Materialities of Place: Ideology on the Chacoan Landscape. In Contemporary Archaeologies of the Southwest, edited by William H. Walker and Kathryn Venzor, pp. 13-48. University Press of Colorado, Boulder.
Van Dyke, Ruth M. (2011) Review of Ancestral Landscapes of the Pueblo World, by James Snead. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Kiva 76(4).
In June 2011, Van Dyke directed field research at the Chaco outlier of Kin Bineola in northwest New Mexico, with graduate students Erina Gruner and Tanya Chiykowski. She continues to wrap up fieldwork from 10 years' working on Chacoan landscapes, and is initiating a new field project in historic archaeology: "Alsatian
Migration, Ethnicities & Identities in 19th Century Texas." During fall 2011, she was a Residential Scholar at the School of Anthropology, University of Arizona, Tucson.
In April 2012, Van Dyke presented an invited paper titled, "The Center Place Emerges - Early Outlier-Chaco Relationships," at the Society for American Archaeology Annual Meeting in Memphis, Tenn.
Van Dyke had two students graduate for whom she was principal advisor: Matt Previto, who wrote his undergraduate honors thesis with her (December 2011), and Erina Gruner, who received her MA in May 2012.
