Samantha Turley

PhD Candidate (Historical archaeology; architecture; GIS; communities of practice)
She/her

Samantha Turley (she/her) is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at Vanderbilt University. Sam holds a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Rochester in Archaeology, Technology, and Historic Structures and a bachelor of music from the Eastman School of Music.

She studies the social relations of architecture in the Late Intermediate Period through middle Colonial period (~1000-1750 CE) in southern Peru. Her work focuses on how the labor and material networks implicated in these building processes coproduced new types of sociopolitical relationships and ways of being during the colonial period. She utilizes archaeometric, geospatial, archival, and experimental archaeological approaches in her research. Her interest in the relationship between colonialism, architecture, and community was inspired by her undergraduate research on the construction phases and spatiality of Elmina Castle on the coast of Ghana. An advocate for open-source scholarship and its opportunities for community engagement, Sam works in QGIS and other open-source softwares to produce models and results accessible to her community partners.

Sam has worked at various archaeological sites throughout Peru, Ghana, and New England. For the past two years she has helped run excavations at the Vaughn Home on Vanderbilt University’s campus. Through the format of an archaeological methods course, this project seeks to explore Vanderbilt's early history and relationship with its workers, many of them first-generation post-emancipation African American women.