Meredith Chesson

Meredith Chesson is professor in the Department of Anthropology with a concurrent appointment in the Department of Gender Studies. As an anthropological archaeologist, Chesson’s chief interests center on the way human beings of the past and present construct and experience difference in their daily lives. Overall, she seeks to understand how people confront everyday challenges and the extraordinary changes throughout their lifetimes by investigating peoples’ built environment, the objects with which they surround themselves, and how they treat their dead.

Chesson holds a Ph.D. (1997) and M.A. (1993) in Anthropology from Harvard University and a B.A. in Classics (with honors) from Brown University (1990). At Notre Dame, Chesson is a fellow of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies and the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies.

Since arriving at Notre Dame in 2000, Chesson has become involved in three major projects: Expedition to the Dead Sea Plain (EDSP), of which she now serves as Co-Director with Dr. Morag M. Kersel (DePaul University), a decades-long project that investigates the earliest emergence of small-scale urbanism (or more appropriately for this area, townism) during the fourth and third millennia BCE (e.g., Early Bronze Age (EBA), c. 3600-2000 BCE) in the southern Levant (modern Jordan, Palestine, Israel, southern Syria, and southern Lebanon); she directed three excavation seasons (summers 2007-2009) at the Final Bronze Age site of Sant’Aniceto (c.1200 – 900 BCE) in southern Calabria as part of the Bova Marina Archaeological Project. Her team investigated daily life in this protohistoric hamlet to establish the material footprint of peoples’ everyday lives before Greek colonization in the 8th century BCE; and, as part of Notre Dame’s Cultural Landscapes of the Irish Landscape (CLIC), she conducted an ethnoarchaeological project in western Connemara from 2011-2019, investigating the ways that people today and in the past use(d) dressers (e.g., hutches) to store and display delph (ceramic and glass vessels) and other heirlooms to transform their houses into proper homes. Chesson is currently working on writing a book about her findings.

Contact

Office: 236 Corbett Family Hall
Phone: 574-631-3775
Email: mchesson@nd.edu