Education Resources
Hi class!
About Me
My name is Lucy Gill, and I’ve been an archaeologist for about ten years. As a kid, I loved going to natural history museums, especially the Field Museum in Chicago, where I’m from, but I didn’t know that you could actually be an archaeologist – I thought it was a job that only existed in movies. When I got to college, I signed up for an archaeology course my first semester, but only to fulfill a requirement, since I thought I was going to major in biology. I didn’t have the chance to do any archaeological fieldwork for another three years, but I immediately fell in love with the way archaeology made me think critically about how histories are created and what those histories can teach us about how to be good stewards (caretakers) of landscapes. Since then, I’ve worked at archaeological sites in Belize, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, and the United States, and I love how much time I get to spend outside!
Me with a boulder covered in Indigenous rock art in the Darién region of Panama, which I first documented on my birthday in 2019!
My research works with local communities who live in Darién to answer questions that are relevant to them today. At the moment, we are focused on two main topics:
How people interacted with the environment in the past (including my favorite topic, what people liked to eat!), and how that continues to affect the environment today; and
1.
how cultural traditions, like pottery making and stone tool making, have persisted and changed over time, and what that can tell us about sociopolitical organization.
2.
I hope you enjoy this journey through the dense jungles of Darién! First step: hop in our field hãp’a (canoe, in the Emberá language)!
Saludos,
Lucy
Darién Profundo Project
I’m now working towards my PhD at the University of California, Berkeley and co-direct an archaeological project in the Darién Province of Panama, which borders Colombia. My project was named Darién Profundo (Deep Darién) by Noé Alvarado, a community leader in Darién and local radio host, who wanted to emphasize the diverse local history of the Province. His ancestors founded the first known free Black settlement in the Americas in 1570, called Santiago del Príncipe, just one of the many interesting but understudied events that have taken place in this area! Darién was first settled by Indigenous people more than 10,000 years ago. The Indigenous population numbered in the millions by the time the first Spanish settlement on the American continent was founded in 1510. During the 1690s, Darién was the site of Scotland’s only colonial expedition, which failed after only eight months due to tropical disease.