Laura Heath-Stout

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University

At the time of European contact in Mexico, the small community of La Laguna lived on the edge of the altepetl of Tecoac, itself peripheral to the Tlaxcallan confederacy. Yet this area was historically important: after a battle at Tecoac, Cortés allied with the Tlaxcaltecas, who proved essential to the conquest. Archaeological materials from the sit...

Field schools are essential for undergraduate students pursuing careers in archaeology, but they are expensive and, consequently, inaccessible to many. Although there have been efforts to rectify this through the creation of scholarships, there have been no systematic studies of the full cost of archaeological field schools. Here, we present a stud...

Since the 1980s, activist archaeologists have used quantitative studies of journal authorship to show that the demographics of archaeological knowledge production are homogeneous. This literature, however, focuses almost exclusively on the gender of archaeologists, without deeply engaging with other forms of identity or adequately addressing the me...

In this article, I use three theories from disability studies-compulsory able-bodiedness, coming out and masquerading, and crip time- o examine stories of non-apparent disability from my interview study of diversity issues among archaeologists. I consider how our discipline privileges some bodies and minds over others and offer suggestions for buil...

This article presents the results of a demographic survey of authors who published in the American Journal of Archaeology between 2000 and 2020. We sought to better understand the demographics of knowledge production in one of the major English-language journals for Mediterranean archaeology, and, by extension, in the field in general. The survey,...

Since Gero’s (1985 Gero, J. M. 1985. “Socio-Politics and the Woman-at-Home Ideology.” American Antiquity 50 (2): 342–350.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) germinal article on gender inequities in archaeology, feminist archaeologists have theorized that research processes are gendered: fieldwork is masculine-coded, and lab and museu...

During the 87th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) in 2022, some of the founders of the newly formed Disabled Archaeologists Network (DAN) organized, led, and participated in a forum discussion about archaeology, ableism, and disability.2 (For our purposes here, “disability” is understood in the most inclusive sense as a r...

The social positions and employment contexts of archeologists shape the production and dissemination of archeological knowledge. Therefore, demographics have far-reaching impacts for how knowledge is constructed and received in the discipline. In this article, we examine these dynamics using the Texas Archeological Society (TAS) and its Bulletin (B...

Field schools are essential for undergraduate students pursuing careers in archaeology, but they are expensive and, consequently, inaccessible to many. Although there have been efforts to rectify this through the creation of scholarships, there have been no systematic studies of the full cost of archaeological field schools. Here, we present a stud...