Erica Hill, Ph.D.

Erica is a broadly trained archaeologist with research interests in Peru and the Arctic. She received her B.A. from the University of Florida, and earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of New Mexico. She has excavation experience in Alaska, Florida, the Southwest U.S, Mexico, Peru, and the Russian Far East and has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Honduras.

Erica is interested in ancient belief systems and cosmology, especially the cross-cultural study of funerary ritual and sacrifice. Her work in Peru focuses on iconography and burial evidence of the Moche, a pre-Inca culture of the Pacific coast of South America. (Selected publications on the Moche)

More recently, Erica’s work has focused on the prehistory of human–animal relations in the Bering Sea region. She is particularly interested in how approaches from animal geography can be applied to archaeological evidence. (Selected publications on human–animal relations.)

Erica is the editor of Iñupiaq Ethnohistory: Selected Essays by Ernest S. Burch, Jr. (2013) and co-editor, with Jon B. Hageman, of The Archaeology of Ancestors: Death, Memory and Veneration (2016).

As a 2016–2017 Fulbright–NSF Arctic Research Scholar, Erica spent a semester at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik studying the Icelandic language and researching the use of horses in Viking Age burial practices.

Many of Erica’s publications are available at academia.edu and at ScholarWorks@UA.