Fellows » Current Fellows » IHUM Fellow: John Chenoweth, PhD
John M. Chenoweth is an anthropological archaeologist who studies social identity, especially the negotiation of religion, race, and nation, through the material world people construct around themselves and leave behind. He has worked on sites from the northeast US to Hawaii, California to Central America, but his focus has been the British Caribbean during the eighteenth century. He studies how social identities are created through daily life and how these forces intersect and compete with each other. To do this, he initiated a multi-year research project in the British Virgin Islands where he conducted archival, historical, and archaeological research on a small, poorer plantation site on the tiny island of Little Jost van Dyke. From about 1725 to 1780, the island was home to the Lettsom family and perhaps two dozen enslaved people of African descent. The Lettsoms were members of a community of the Religious Society of Friends, better known as “Quakers,” who are more often associated with the abolition movement to end slavery than with slaveholding, and so forces of religion, race, gender, class, and national identities were all under negotiation at this site.
He completed his PhD in Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he specialized in historical archaeology and archaeological method and theory. Before that, he earned an MA in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, also focusing in historical archaeology.