Dr. Brandon Ritchison

Biography

Brandon T. Ritchison is an anthropological archaeologist who examines relationships between mobility, environment, history, and sociopolitical organization along the coasts and islands of the Southeastern United States. His research spans over four thousand years and includes archaeological investigations in Kentucky, Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina. His focus is particularly on the relationships between migrations, mobility strategies, climate change, and the sociopolitical organizations in ancient Eastern United States during the final centuries before the onset of European colonialism. He is currently examining the 14th-century abandonment of the Savannah River Valley and its effects on subsequent large-scale immigration events to the neighboring Georgia Coast. Furthermore, he is revising archaeological understandings of settlement mobility patterns in the Late Precontact Middle Ohio Valley. His research employs multi-scalar spatial and chronological analyses of settlement patterns, ceramics, and radiocarbon data. He also enjoys instructing and supervising over 130 students and volunteers in test-unit excavations, shallow geophysical surveys, and systematic shovel test surveys at various sites along the Georgia Coast, including the Kenan Field site, a 60-hectare multi-component site on Sapelo Island, Georgia, supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation. His ongoing research aims to understand the development of institutionalized inequality, particularly in relation to mobility practices, concepts of property and ownership, debt, and gender.

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Courses