About Me
Dr. Christina M. Carolus is an anthropological archaeologist with interests in human-environmental interaction, domestication processes, paleoecology, archaeological scientific methods and theory, foodways, identity, multispecies approaches, and cultural heritage issues. Her research primarily concerns the study of prehistoric lifeways through holistic archaeobotanical investigation. Currently a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Spatial and Historical Network Dynamics (SAHND) Laboratory in the Department of Anthropology at Penn State University, Christina’s research pursues the origins of agriculture on the eastern Eurasian steppe and explores its underrecognized role(s) in the foundations of regional political complexity.
Since 2010, she has excavated and carried out archaeobotanical field research in North America (USA), Central America (Belize; Mexico; Guatemala), South America (Peru; Argentina), Polynesia (Hawaii), and Central and East Asia (Kyrgyzstan; Mongolia). She has also managed a series of collections-based research projects at the Yale Peabody Museum and in the Yale Department of Anthropology, ranging from materials characterization and sourcing to analyses of faunal skeletal remains. Her collections research, her doctoral research, and her post-doctoral research ultimately fall under a set of unifying themes connected to subsistence, domestication, human-nonhuman (i.e. multispecies) relations, sociopolitical transformation, and material evidence of long distance interactive networks as revealed through multiproxy archaeological scientific methods.
Christina received her doctoral degree from Yale University in 2025 (Dissertation Title: “Sowing the Seeds of Empire: Archaeobotanical and Biomolecular Perspectives on Subsistence Transformation and the Emergence of Early Political Complexity on the Mongolian Steppe”) and completed several long term inter-institutional exchanges during the doctorate. These included research and training at the BioArch Research Centre (University of York), where she received analytical training in paleoproteomic and lipid residue techniques, as well as the Trent Environmental Archaeology Laboratory (TEAL) at Trent University, where she received training in stable isotopic analysis of archaeological crop remains.
She currently co-directs investigations at the late Iron Age site of Khairt Suuryn, a large Xiongnu Period (c.250 BC-150 AD) agricultural pit house settlement site and craft production complex overlooking the floodplain of the Kherlen River in northeastern Mongolia. Khairt Suuryn is only the third prehistoric site in Mongolia to yield crop assemblages and one of only a few known pit house settlements. Khairt Suuryn is a crucial puzzle piece to understanding the social and economic origins of agriculture on the steppe, the potential origins of early sedentism or semi-sedentism, and dynamics of network growth on the immediate path to initial state formation in this region of the world.
Education
PhD Anthropology (Archaeology Concentration), Yale University (2025)
M.Phil Anthropology (Archaeology Concentration), Yale University (2021)
B.A. Anthropology, UC Berkeley (2015)