When Sonya Atalay conducted her doctoral research, she studied pottery in \u00c7atalh\u00f6y\u00fck, a remarkable ancient site in Turkey. It\u2019s one of the world\u2019s earliest known urban settlements, flourishing by at least 7000 B.C.E.<\/p>\n
Yet even as Atalay was conducting field research and writing her doctoral thesis, she was scrutinizing standard archaeological practices, believing the discipline to be in need of an update. Indeed, it\u2019s an issue she had been grappling with going back to her undergraduate days, when she first went to a dig site near Rome.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I started doing archaeological work, the local people were labor,\u201d says Atalay, now a professor at MIT. \u201cThey came, they cleaned your clothes, they cleaned the dig house, they weren\u2019t thought of as having important connections with the archaeology, and that really bothered me.\u201d <\/p>\n
Surely, she believed, a culture producing the remarkable things worth studying is worth including in that research process, too. As she says, given \u201ctheir place-based knowledge, it seemed like we should be talking to people about their heritage. They\u2019re the ones who live on or near sites. I started thinking about what archaeology could look like if it included local communities in a meaningful way.\u201d <\/p>\n
Atalay completed her dissertation while continuing to examine how researchers could alter their approach. She has since published articles and books about the subject, worked to introduce new research practices, and today, as an MIT professor, is a leader in the growing field of community-based archaeology, building partnerships between researchers and local residents.<\/p>\n
Among other things, Atalay is the director and principal investigator of the Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Science (CBIKS), a National Science Foundation-backed project that helps train scholars and implement community-oriented work. She is convinced that community-oriented work creates better outcomes in many fields. <\/p>\n
\u201cA community-based approach is highly applicable beyond archaeology and anthropology, outside of the social sciences,\u201d Atalay says. \u201cI think there\u2019s a lot for engineers or designers or folks in a lot of different fields to learn by involving community members in the research process.\u201d<\/p>\n
Atalay joined MIT with tenure in 2024, where she is a professor in MIT\u2019s Anthropology Section.<\/p>\n
Roll me away<\/strong><\/p>\n Atalay grew up in Michigan, not far from Detroit, where she was the first person from her family to go to college. Growing up, she hoped to be a physician. <\/p>\n \u201cI wanted to be a doctor. That\u2019s what I thought I was going to do,\u201d Atalay says. \u201cI wanted to be a pediatrician.\u201d <\/p>\n But she also developed an interest in ancient history, something she can date to a precise moment. A 4th grade teacher named Barbara Eisman would give Atalay extra reading when Atalay would finish homework early. One day, Eisman produced a book about ancient Greece and Rome. <\/p>\n \u201cI remember thinking, this is amazing, discovering things I never knew existed,\u201d Atalay says. \u201cAnd that stuck with me.\u201d<\/p>\n By the time Atalay enrolled at the University of Michigan, she was still planning to become a doctor. But as an undergraduate, she enjoyed taking archaeology electives to such an extent that she simply changed career paths. <\/p>\n \u201cI loved it and just got so into it,\u201d Atalay says. And Michigan even provided opportunities for undergraduate fieldwork near Rome, although that meant Atalay had to dig deep to finance her first trip to an archaeological site. <\/p>\n \u201cI worked at a nightclub and put myself through college by bartending,\u201d Atalay says. \u201cI had a motorcycle, so I was tooling around Ann Arbor. Then I sold my motorcycle to buy the plane ticket to go to Rome so I could take part in the archaeological fieldwork.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cRelationships are the task\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n After graduating, Atalay was accepted into the graduate program for anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, where she earned an MA and then, in 2003, her PhD. While Atalay\u2019s doctoral research focused on the ancient pottery at \u00c7atalh\u00f6y\u00fck, she maintained a steady interest in helping archaeology evolve. <\/p>\n And increasingly, she started drawing on her own observations about fieldwork in the U.S., too. Atalay is Native American, and she recognized the same patterns of exclusion and archaeological extraction being applied to the historical study of Native American societies. <\/p>\n One additional influence in shaping Atalay\u2019s thinking was the North American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), passed by the U.S. federal government in 1990. It requires federal institutions to return human remains, sacred objects, and other cultural materials to Native Americans. Seeing the law enacted reinforced to Atalay that progress in this domain is possible. <\/p>\n \u201cThe push for that act was really about Indigenous people standing up for sovereignty. To return what was wrongfully taken and to carry out research in an ethical way moving forward, there has to be trust and partnerships built,\u201d Atalay says. While observing advocates trying to get NAGPRA passed, she adds, \u201cI learned a lot from them.\u201d<\/p>\n Over time, Atalay went on to serve multiple terms on the commission overseeing NAGPRA, first appointed by President George W. Bush and then President Barack Obama. Ultimately, her perspective has been fed by many sources, converging on similar themes. <\/p>\n \u201cI was really uncomfortable with how local people weren\u2019t involved with studies of their own heritage,\u201d Atalay says. \u201cSo I started thinking about what would it look like to truly partner with communities to plan and carry out research. And that\u2019s how I started my first book, trying to set up a model for how to do ethical work in partnership with communities.\u201d<\/p>\n That book, \u201cCommunity-Based Archaeology: Research with, by, and for Indigenous and Local Communities\u201d was published by the University of California Press in 2012. In her work, Atalay has focused on a range of specific practices, from research development to fieldwork methods and protecting intellectual property rights for Indigenous people. But the starting point for any work, she emphasizes, is relationship-building and the creation of mutual trust. <\/p>\n \u201cI tell students, \u2018Relationships are the task,\u2019\u201d Atalay says. \u201cI know you want to get in there and carry out fieldwork, but the relationships are everything. Sitting down and talking and sharing life stories and developing trust. Those relationships move at the speed of trust. And that takes time to develop. That\u2019s the key piece. And that\u2019s going to lead to good research outcomes.\u201d<\/p>\n Stronger together<\/strong><\/p>\n After receiving her PhD, Atalay had postdocs at UC Berkeley as well as Stanford University, then joined the faculty at Indiana University. In 2012, Atalay moved to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, before joining MIT two years ago.<\/p>\n Currently Atalay is working on multiple projects. As director of CBIKS, she is running an organization with eight research \u201chubs,\u201d where nearly 100 affiliated scholars are working with over 50 Indigenous communities to establish partnerships that advance environmental, and scientific research projects. <\/p>\n In some cases, the scholars are involved in familiar-seeming archaeological work, while other center projects involve topics such as enhancing salmon farming, clam cultivation, or returning native seeds from museums to tribes in the Southwest, where elders still retain knowledge for their appropriate use and care.<\/p>\n \u201cOur team members across multiple disciplines are learning from each other,\u201d Atalay says. \u201cSo archaeologists and heritage management scholars are talking to environmental scientists and team members who study seeds and agriculture.\u201d The NSF sometimes refers to this as \u201dconvergence science.\u201d The center\u2019s name uses the metaphor of braiding, to represent the ways different strands of knowledge can be woven together to form a sturdy whole.<\/p>\n \u201cWith braiding, each of the strands retains its integrity, and they\u2019re stronger when they\u2019re brought together,\u201d says Atalay. She is also currently working on another book project, \u201cBraiding Knowledges,\u201d about how the community-based approach can enhance and strengthen research within universities; it is under contract with the University of Arizona Press. <\/p>\n At MIT, Atalay adds, she is delighted by the range of students who have started taking her classes, begun thinking about applications to all kinds of projects, and who in turn may end up leading innovative, community-oriented projects of their own.<\/p>\n \u201cI would encourage anyone, no matter what field they\u2019re in, to think about working with a community,\u201d Atalay says. \u201cWhat we\u2019re learning isn\u2019t just about working with Indigenous communities. It\u2019s applicable outside of anthropology, outside of the social sciences. There is a lot you can learn and contribute to society by carrying out research this way, in any number of fields.\u201d<\/p>\n Source: News Boston \u2013 MIT<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A leading innovator in community-based archaeology, Professor Sonya Atalay works to link local know-how with academic inquiry across the globe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15194997,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[166],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15139380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-boston"],"featured_image_urls":{"full":["https:\/\/www.inthacity.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/15139380-mit-sonia-atalay-01-press-1.jpg",1074,716,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.inthacity.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/15139380-mit-sonia-atalay-01-press-1-300x200.jpg",300,200,true],"medium":["https:\/\/www.inthacity.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/15139380-mit-sonia-atalay-01-press-1-620x413.jpg",620,413,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/www.inthacity.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/15139380-mit-sonia-atalay-01-press-1-768x512.jpg",768,512,true],"large":["https:\/\/www.inthacity.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/15139380-mit-sonia-atalay-01-press-1-940x627.jpg",940,627,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/www.inthacity.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/15139380-mit-sonia-atalay-01-press-1.jpg",1074,716,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/www.inthacity.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/15139380-mit-sonia-atalay-01-press-1.jpg",1074,716,false],"post-thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.inthacity.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/15139380-mit-sonia-atalay-01-press-1-998x665.jpg",998,665,true],"ignition_item":["https:\/\/www.inthacity.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/15139380-mit-sonia-atalay-01-press-1-670x446.jpg",670,446,true],"ignition_item_lg":["https:\/\/www.inthacity.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/15139380-mit-sonia-atalay-01-press-1.jpg",1074,716,false],"ignition_article_media":["https:\/\/www.inthacity.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/15139380-mit-sonia-atalay-01-press-1-510x510.jpg",510,510,true],"ignition_minicart_item":["https:\/\/www.inthacity.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/15139380-mit-sonia-atalay-01-press-1-160x160.jpg",160,160,true],"profile_24":["https:\/\/www.inthacity.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/15139380-mit-sonia-atalay-01-press-1-24x24.jpg",24,24,true],"profile_48":["https:\/\/www.inthacity.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/15139380-mit-sonia-atalay-01-press-1-48x48.jpg",48,48,true],"profile_96":["https:\/\/www.inthacity.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/15139380-mit-sonia-atalay-01-press-1-96x96.jpg",96,96,true],"profile_150":["https:\/\/www.inthacity.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/15139380-mit-sonia-atalay-01-press-1-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"profile_300":["https:\/\/www.inthacity.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/15139380-mit-sonia-atalay-01-press-1-300x300.jpg",300,300,true]},"author_info":{"display_name":"news.iNthacity","author_link":"https:\/\/www.inthacity.com\/news\/author\/atombo\/"},"category_info":"Boston<\/a>","tag_info":"Boston","comment_count":"0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.inthacity.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15139380","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.inthacity.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.inthacity.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.inthacity.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.inthacity.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15139380"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.inthacity.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15139380\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15139381,"href":"https:\/\/www.inthacity.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15139380\/revisions\/15139381"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.inthacity.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15194997"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.inthacity.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15139380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.inthacity.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15139380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.inthacity.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15139380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}