Fellows » Current Fellows » IHUM Fellow: Sarah Peelo, PhD
Sarah Peelo’s ongoing research investigates the daily lives of indigenous peoples living in the California Spanish missions. She has conducted research exploring the motivations for the relatively rapid incorporation of Native Californians into the Spanish missions. More recently she has been examining how displaced indigenous peoples negotiated identities during colonial moments, emphasizing the relationship between technology, daily practice, and social identity.
She has developed technical expertise in archaeometric analysis of ceramic materials, utilizing techniques such as petrography and electron microprobe analysis in her research. Her interests in the archaeology and ethnohistory of colonial California began as an undergraduate at Santa Clara University (1999), and continued as she completed a Master’s degree at Colorado State University (2001), Ph.D.
at UC Santa Cruz (2009), and during her position as a UC President’s postdoc at UC Davis (2009-2011). Sarah is currently developing a new research project at Mission San Antonio de Padua where she seeks to investigate the ways in which diverse indigenous groups came together and formed a new community identity within the spaces of the Indian Rancheria