Faculty & Staff
Geoffrey R. Hughes
Lecturer
Archaeology
PhD, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2023
Email: grhughes@uncg.edu
Research Interests
- African American and African Diaspora Archaeology
- Religious and Utopian Communities
- Technology, Identity, and Social Inequality
- Landscape, Textuality, and Material Culture
- Public Archaeology and Contemporary Interpretations of the Past
Courses Taught
- ATY 153L: The Human Species Lab
- ATY 158: Adventures in Time Travel through Archaeology
- ATY 240- Indigenous Towns and Temple Mounds: North American Archaeology
Personal Statement
As a historical archaeologist, I study the development of our modern, global world through the objects, texts, and landscapes created and used by people during and after European expansion. I am particularly interested in how people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, from diverse backgrounds and with complex identities, dealt with systems of inequality resulting from colonialism and ideas of “modernity”—the legacies of which continue to impact societies today. By exploring archaeological sites from the more recent past we gain a better understanding of our contemporary world, how it came to be, and why we continue to struggle with the many “-isms” of inequality: racism, classism, sexism, etc.
Articles
- Hughes, Geoffrey (2023) “Becoming American in Salem’s Congregation Pottery.” In Moravian Americans and their neighbors, 1772-1822, edited by Ulrike Wiethaus and Grant P McAllister, pp. 308–327. Early American history series, 1877-0216 ; volume 13. Brill, Leiden.
- Hughes, Geoffrey (2013), Building Bridges and Bearing Archaeological Witness, South Carolina Antiquities, 45, pp65-68 (view PDF)
- Hughes, Geoffrey (2022), Peter Oliver: Revisiting and Reassessing the Life of a Moravian African American Potter, Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts, (https://www.mesdajournal.org/2022/peter-oliver-revisiting-and-reassessing-the-life-of-a-moravian-african-american-potter/)
Current Projects
I completed my dissertation research which examines how Moravian potters made/remade their identities through the introduction of new ceramic technologies in the theocratic town of Salem, North Carolina, from 1784 until 1831.
