Sarah E. Oas (Ph.D. Arizona State University) is a Postdoctoral Scholar in Anthropology at the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University. She is collaborating with Crow Canyon as a paleoethnobotanist to build a comprehensive database of archaeological maize for Colorado and the Greater Southwest.
Sarah is an archaeologist who specializes in paleoethnobotany. Her interests span foodways, ethnobotany, political ecology, ethnoarchaeology, and environmental archaeology. In her dissertation, Sarah examines the interplay between daily foodways and processes of broader social and environmental change. Drawing on an extensive range of archaeological collections, legacy data, and archival materials, her research addresses relationships between daily food practices and processes of population aggregation and community formation in the Cibola region of west-central New Mexico and east-central Arizona in the 13th and 14th centuries. Her previous research and publications have explored a range of human-plant relationships, including the domestication of oil palm and early agriculture in West Africa and the political ecology and environmental legacy of sugar plantations in the Caribbean.