Professor Dr. Alicia Ventresca Miller

Biography

Alicia Ventresca-Miller is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan and an Associate Curator for Archaeological Sciences at the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology. Her research interests focus on ancient diet mobility, pastoral lifeways, social complexity, and the rise of urban economies, particularly in Central Asia, Inner Asia, and Siberia. Ventresca-Miller employs biomolecular techniques to investigate shifts in food production that intersect with the emergence of complex societies. Her work incorporates a multi-species anthropological approach to explore the mechanisms fueling urbanization, residential mobility, settlement provisioning, and the adoption of domesticates such as millet and livestock. Her research provides nuanced answers to questions about domestication and urbanization in the past, using novel isotopic proteomic methods. She leads an active laboratory program that combines archaeology and chemistry to study ancient cuisines and human mobility, with current fieldwork focusing on proto-urban sites in central Kazakhstan and the salvaging of looted Mongol-era cemeteries in northern Mongolia.

Research Interests

Courses