Lee Panich, Ph.D. employs a combination of archaeological, ethnographic, and archival data to examine the long-term entanglements between California’s indigenous societies and colonial institutions, particularly the Spanish mission system. He has conducted investigations of Native American life at Mission Santa Clara de Asís, on the SCU campus, as well as at Mission Santa Catalina in Baja California, Mexico. He is currently the co-director of a collaborative research project focused on autonomous indigenous villages that existed at the crossroads of the Spanish, Russian, Mexican, and American frontiers in Marin County, California. Since 2009, Dr. Panich has also worked with researchers from the Mexican Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia to understand the geological and archaeological distribution of obsidian in Baja California.

Courses

• Anthropology 2: Introduction to Archaeology
• Anthropology 4: Vanished Peoples and Lost Civilizations
• Anthropology 114: Senior Seminar
• Anthropology 146: Anthropological Perspectives on Colonial California
• Anthropology 148: Historical Archaeology
• Anthropology 149: Virtual Santa Clara - History and Culture
• Anthropology 195: Field Course in Anthropological Methods
• Anthropology 196: Archaeological Methods and Theory

Publications

Selected Publications:

Panich, Lee M. 2022. “Archaeology, Indigenous Erasure, and the Creation of White Public Space at the California Missions.” Journal of Social Archaeology. DOI: 10.1177/14696053211061675

Schneider, Tsim D., and Lee M. Panich, eds. 2022. Archaeologies of Indigenous Presence. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

Panich, Lee M., and Sara L. Gonzalez, eds. 2021. Routledge Handbook of the Archaeology of Indigenous-Colonial Interaction in the Americas. London: Routledge.

Panich, Lee M., Mark Hylkema, and Tsim D. Schneider. 2021. “Points of Contention: Tradition, Resistance, and Arrow Points in the California Missions.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 64: 101366.

Panich, Lee M. 2020. Narratives of Persistence: Indigenous Negotiations of Colonialism in Alta and Baja California. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Panich, Lee M., and Tsim D. Schneider. 2019. “Categorical Denial: Evaluating Post-1492 Indigenous Erasure in the Paper Trail of American Archaeology.” American Antiquity 84 (4): 651–688.

Panich, Lee M., Ben Griffin, and Tsim D. Schneider. 2018. “Native Acquisition of Obsidian in Colonial-Era Central California: Implications from Mission San José.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 50: 1–11.