Michelle Young

Michelle E. Young is a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University in the department of Anthropology. She received her B.A. from the University of Virginia in 2009 with a double major in the History of Art and Anthropology and a minor in Spanish. She has conducted archaeological field and lab work in the United States, Belize, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Madagascar and has held internships at the Museo Larco in Lima, Peru, and at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC. Her dissertation project aims to understand the relationship between long-distance interaction and the emergence of new forms of social behavior in Peru during the early first millennium BC at the site of Atalla, located in the remote highlands of Huancavelica. Since 2014, she has directed the Proyecto de Investigación Arqueológica Atalla, carrying out mapping, survey, excavation, sample collection, and laboratory analysis of materials at Atalla in collaboration with Peruvian and international students and scholars and local workers. Her project also established a multi-year program of community outreach and education in the small agrarian community of Atalla. Her research has been supported by generous funding from Yale University including CLAIS, Tinker-Field, MacMillan, Josef Albers, Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies and external funding from the National Science Foundation, Fulbright, and the Rust Family Foundation.