DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY

• mark-hauser@northwestern.edu
• 847-467-1648
• 1810 Hinman, #210

I am committed to low-impact archaeology that incorporates collections-based research, survey methodologies, and targeted excavations that answers small questions with big implications.  Specifically, my research combines archaeological, environmental science, and historical methods to explore how people solve problems not of their own making. My approach is to compare and connect colonial contexts through everyday objects, archival representations of landscape, and built environments, focusing on how communities organize their economies and adapt to changing social, political, and environmental conditions. Topically, my work focuses on substantive economies, colonialism, slavery and empire, and the historical roots of water security. Geographically, my fieldwork has centered post-agrarian contexts in the Caribbean and southern India.  

My current research explores through collaborative projects in southern India and Trinidad. In southern India, I examine long-term relationships among labor, landscape, and resource management to understand how communities adapted to shifting political, economic, and ecological conditions. In Trinidad, the REACH (Resilience, Environmental Archaeology, and Community Heritage) project investigates the history of water systems, environmental uncertainty, and colonial infrastructure using archaeological and environmental scientific approaches.

I have written extensively on the archaeology of colonialism and political economy in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean worlds, examining the material lives of enslaved and free communities, patterns of exchange and consumption, and the emergence of colonial capitalism. My work integrates archaeological analysis with environmental and landscape-based approaches drawn from physical geography and earth sciences, and has appeared in Current Anthropology, American Anthropologist, and PLOS Water, reflecting an interdisciplinary commitment that bridges archaeology, anthropology, history, and environmental research.

My research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, among other organizations. This support has sustained long-term archaeological fieldwork in the Caribbean and southern India, fostered interdisciplinary collaborations with historians, environmental scientists, and community partners, and enabled research that connects the archaeology of colonialism, substantive economies, and water security with contemporary questions of resilience and environmental change.

Hauser, M. W. and J. Haines 2023 Modern Worlds and their Archaeological Record, Indian Ocean in Planetary Relief. University Press of Florida

Hauser, Mark W. 2008 An Archaeology of Black Markets: Local Ceramics and Local Economies In Eighteenth-Century Jamaica. Ripley Bullen Series in Caribbean Archaeology, University Press of Florida: Gainesville.  

Hauser M. W. and D. Wallman (eds.) 2020 Archaeology in Dominica: Everyday Ecologies and Economies at Morne Patate. University Press of Florida: Gainesville.

Hauser, Mark W. 2021 Mapping Water on Dominica: Archaeologies of Water and Enslavement under Colonialism. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Hauser, Mark W., Kacey Grauer* 2026. Don’t’ forget to ask your local archaeologist: Water security’s material record. PLOS Water, 5(6), e0000558.

Hauser, Mark W., Ashleigh Morris*, Karishma Nanhu, Shad Gobinsingh, Chike Pilgrim, Zara Ali In Press “Indentureship in Southern Trinidad: The Archaeological Record” Journal of Caribbean History (December 2025)

Hauser, Mark, Ayana Omilade Flewellen, Julia Jong Haines, Jayshree Mungur-Medhi, Rahul Oka, and Natalie Swanepoel 2026 Enslavement and Domestic Space. In The Oxford Handbook of the Comparative Archaeology of Slavery, edited by Mark Paul Leone, and Jane Louise Webster, pp. 0. Oxford University Press.)

Harris, Khadene*and Mark W. Hauser 2025 "Caribbean Waterways: Colonial Regimes and the Anthropocene," in El Antropoceno como Crisis Múltiples. Perspectivas desde América Latina edited by Luisa R. Ellermeier, Omar Sierra & Eric Rummelhoff. Centro Maria Sibylla Merian de Estudios Latinoamericanos Avanzados (CALAS). (Submitted June 15th 2024)

Hauser, Mark W. 2025 "Recovering a Substantive Landscape of Mobility" Journal of Anthropological Archaeology (Submitted 12/15/2025)

Wallman, Diane, Mark W. Hauser, E Schwalbe, D, K Kelly, L Honychurch 2024 “Woody Resources as a Medium for Colonial Engagement: Explaining Artifactual and Architectural Record at LaSoye 2 in Dominica. Revista de Arquelogîa Americana (submitted August 21st, 2023)

Hauser, Mark W. 2024A Tale of Two Maps: Archaeological Consideration of Two Danish Colonial Enclaves During the Long 18th Century. Eighteenth Century Studies (Submitted July 12th, 2023)

Furmanchuk, A. O., Rydland, K. J., Hsia, R. Y., Mackersie, R., Shi, M., Hauser, M. W., ... & Stey, A. M. (2023). Geographic disparities in re-triage destinations among seriously injured californians. Annals of surgery open, 4(1), e270.

Hauser, Mark W. 2022 The Work of Boundaries: Critical Cartographies and the Archaeological Record Annual Review of Anthropology.

Hauser, M.W., Emily Schewalbe*, Khadene Harris*, Wallman, D., , 2021 Everyday Forms of Resilience: Toward a Social Archaeology of Enslavement And Environment. The Archaeological Record 21 (5) 19-24.

Hauser, Mark W.  and V Selvakumar 2021 Gardens of the Coromandel Coast: Archaeological Survey of Commercial Landscape Assemblages in Danish Gardens in Tamil Nadu, South India. International Journal of Historical Archaeology Oct 15, 2020, Accepted December 15, 2020.

Hauser, M.W., Armstrong, D.V., Wallman, D., Kelly, K.G. and Honychurch, L., 2019. “Where strangers met: evidence for early commerce at LaSoye Point, Dominica.” Antiquity, 93(371).

Oas, Sarah E., and Mark W. Hauser. 2018 "The Political Ecology of Plantations from the Ground Up." Environmental Archaeology 23(1): 4-12.

Hauser, Mark W., W. Battle-Baptiste, K. Ozawa,  B. Voss, R. McGuire, R. Bernbeck, S. Pollock, S. Atalay, Uzma Rizvi, C. Hernandez* 2018 “Archaeology as Bearing Witness”. American Anthropologist. 120 (3): 535-548.

Hauser, Mark W. 2018 “Huge Oceans, Small Comparisons: Danish Forts and their enclaves in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans.” In Power, Political Economy, and Historical Landscapes of the Modern World: Interdisciplinary Perspectives”  Pp 349-374. C. R. DeCorse (ed). Binghamton NY: Binghamton University Press.  

Hauser, Mark W. 2017. “A Political Ecology of Water and Enslavement: Water Ways in Eighteenth-Century Caribbean Plantations” Current Anthropology 58(2)227-256

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