Joyce Marcus

Joyce Marcus is a Latin American archaeologist and professor in the Department of Anthropology, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She also holds the position of Curator of Latin American Archaeology, University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology. Marcus has published extensively in the field of Latin American archaeological research. Her focus has been primarily on the Zapotec, Maya, and coastal Andean civilizations of Central and South America. Much of her fieldwork has been concentrated in the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico. She is known for her "Dynamic model", four-tiered hierarchy, and her use of interdisciplinary study.

Joyce Marcus was born in California. She credits receiving a copy of An Introduction to the Study of the Maya Hieroglyphs by S.G. Morley from Dr. Robert F. Heizer in 1969 after a field season in Lovelock, Nevada with influencing her to get into the field of hieroglyphics.

She received her B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1969, and went on to receive her M.A. in 1971 and her Ph.D in 1974, both from Harvard University. She did her dissertation under her mentor, Tatiana Proskouriakoff, and Gordon R. Willey, Jeremy A. Sabloff, and Evon Z. Vogt. Her book, Emblem and State in the Classic Maya Lowlands: An Epigraphic Approach to Territorial Organization, is the published version of her dissertation.

Marcus has spent her entire teaching career at the University of Michigan, from 1973 to the present, though she has been invited to guest lecture all over the world. She became a curator for Latin American Archaeology for the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology in 1978. She has also consulted for the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the University Museum at the University of Pennsylvania, the Cotson Institute of Archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Peabody Museum at Harvard University.

...
Wikipedia