Nan A. Rothschild Papers

Nan A. Rothschild was a professor of Anthropology from 1981-2006 at Barnard College. Since 2007 she has been an adjunct professor of Anthropology at Columbia University.

She received her masters from Columbia University and her PhD from New York University in 1975.

Rothschild’s research interests reflect a concern with the manifestation of social realities in the patterning of material things. She has done prehistoric, historic, and ethno-archaeology; her field research has taken place in North America, in and around New York City, on the Zuni Reservation and in the Rio Grande Valley in New Mexico. As Principal Investigator in excavations in lower Manhattan beginning in the late 1970’s, she spearheaded the field of urban and modern historical archeology.

She has also worked with museum collections and has studied a number of socio-cultural issues: colonial encounters in North America, changes in gender role and status, the construction and recognition of coherent sub-units within urban entities, and the way in which food is used to express social and symbolic concepts.

Her published books include New York City Neighborhoods: The 18th Century, Colonial Encounters in a Native American Landscape, and The Archaeology of American Cities written with Diana diZerega Wall.

In 2016 the Landmarks Preservation Commission opened the Nan A. Rothschild Research Center, the first municipal archive devoted to a city’s own archaeological collection.

Rothschild served as president of the New York Archaeological Council and of Professional Archaeologists of New York City (PANYC) and was a member of the Executive Committee Board of the Society for American Archaeology, an Associate Editor of American Antiquity, and a member of the Nomination Committee of the American Anthropological Association.