- Campus:
- IU Bloomington
Education
Ph.D., Anthropology, Harvard University, 1974
B.A., Anthropology, Harvard University, 1969
In 1997, after more than a quarter-century of work devoted to Central Andean cultures, Geoffrey Conrad began excavating in the Dominican Republic on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola (also known as Santo Domingo), where he studied the development of the Taíno chiefdoms encountered by Christopher Columbus and the early Spanish explorers of the Caribbean. In addition to being an example of the pristine development of complex chiefdoms, the Taínos were the first American Indians to undergo conquest by Europeans, and many of the practices that characterized the Spanish conquests of Mexico and Peru were first employed in the Caribbean.
Conrad’s studies concentrated on roughly the last 500 years before the arrival of Columbus and the first few centuries thereafter. Using both archaeological data and written records dating to the early colonial era, he sought to determine how practices and institutions described by early European observers like Bartolomé de Las Casas and Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés are reflected in the ground (and in some cases why the archaeological data seem to contradict the written records). His investigations convinced him that the traditional interpretation—namely, that the Taínos were extinct by 1535, the victims of warfare, overwork, and disease—is overly simplistic. His later work traced the post-1492 development of Taíno culture archaeologically.
Conrad believes it is vitally important for anthropologists and archaeologists to explain what they do, and why it is important, to the public. He is particularly interested in museums as means of communicating with the public. In addition to his archaeological research and teaching of courses in archaeology and museum studies, he served as director of the William Hammond Mathers Museum, Indiana University’s museum of world cultures, from 1983–2012.
Selected Publications
2017 (with Matthew Maus, John Foster, and Charles Beeker) Underwater Caves in the Taino World. In The Archaeology of Underwater Caves, ed. by Peter Campbell. Highfield Press, Southampton, UK.
2002 (with Charles Beeker and John Foster) Taino Use of Flooded Caverns in the East National Park Region, Dominican Republic. Journal of Caribbean Archaeology 3. Florida Museum of Natural History, Gainesville.
1992 Inca Imperialism: The Great Simplification and the Accident of Empire. In Ideology and Pre-Columbian Civilizations, ed. by Arthur Demarest and Geoffrey Conrad. School of American Research Press, Santa Fe.
1984 (with Arthur Demarest) Religion and Empire: The Dynamics of Aztec and Inca Expansionism. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.