Adrian Praetzellis

My archaeological career began in 1972 when I began working full-time on Roman and medieval sites on the British digging circuit. Later, I worked on prehistoric and 18th-/19th-century archaeology in Virginia, the Great Basin, and California.

From 1992 to 2017 I taught archaeology and cultural resources management as Professor of Anthropology and was Director of the Anthropological Studies Center (a University research institute) and the David A. Fredrickson Archaeological Collections Facility, which curated materials from Northern California.

I am the author/illustrator of four archaeology textbooks: Death by Theory (AltaMira Press 2000, 2011), Dug to Death (AltaMira Press, 2003), Archaeological Theory in a Nutshell (Routledge 2015, 2023), and Historical Archaeology in a Nutshell (Routledge 2025); I have been a pre-publication reviewer for several professional journals and served on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Historical Archaeology and California Archaeology.