Shayla Monroe
Research Interests
African pastoralism, zooarchaeology of the Nile Valley, political ecology of the Sahara and the Sahel, faunal analysis, the effects of climate change on intergroup cooperation and conflict.
Teaching Interests
Zooarchaeology, environmental archaeology, four-field and interdisciplinary approaches to studying the African past, exploring the relationship between colonialism and anthropological knowledge of African cultures.
Shayla Monroe received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), in 2021. She specializes in faunal analysis, the social zooarchaeology of Sudan and Egypt, the archaeology of African pastoralism. Her dissertation analyzes the acquisition of cattle at the ancient Egyptian colonial fortress of Askut (c. 1850 – 1550 BC) and its implications for culture contact and asymmetrical power relations between pastoralists and non-pastoralists. Monroe earned her M.A. in Anthropology from UCSB in 2015. Since 2013, she has worked as an archaeologist at the 3rd Cataract of the Nile River in Sudan, first at the Egyptian colonial site at Tombos, and then at the Kerma hinterlands site, Abu Fatima, also in northern Sudan. Monroe began her career at Howard University, where she earned degrees in Anthropology and English (2012). She also spent two seasons (2010 and 2011) working at L’Hermitage plantation (also known as the Best Farm Slave Village) with the National Park Service in Frederick, Maryland.
Dr. Monroe’s present research focuses on mapping social networks and relationships among pastoralists in the Middle Nile Valley and adjacent regions from the Late Neolithic to the end of the Bronze Age.