Southern Illinois University

Faculty Member, Anthropology

Distinguished Professor of Anthropology

College of Liberal Arts

About

Izumi Shimada is a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale with research interests in the archaeology of complex pre-Hispanic cultures in the Andes, the technology and organization of craft production, mortuary analysis, experimental archaeology, the role of ideology and organized religion in cultural developments, and ecology-culture interaction.

He was born in Kyoto, Japan in 1948 and came to the U.S. in 1964. He majored in anthropology at Cornell (B.A. 1971) where he became interested in the ancient Andean civilization and experimental archaeology under tutelage of Prof. John V. Murra and Robert Ascher, respectively. Two seasons (1973, 1975) of archaeological fieldwork at the Moche city of Pampa Grande (ca. A.D. 600-750) in northern coast of Peru led to his doctorate in anthropology from the University of Arizona in 1976. Since then, he taught at University of Oregon (1977-8), Princeton (1978-1983) and Harvard (1984-1991) before coming to the SIUC in 1994.

From 1978 to the present, he has directed the Sicán Archaeological Project focusing on the developmental processes, technology, religion, and other aspects of the pre-Hispanic Sicán culture (ca. A.D. 800-1400) on the northern coast of Peru. The project results formed the foundation of the Sicán National Museum in Ferreñafe, Peru that opened in 2004.

In 2003 he begun interdisciplinary investigation into the social foundations and the paleoenvironmental context of the famed religious center of Pachacamac outside the city of Lima. The government (2003) and the congress (2006) of Peru bestowed him medals of honor for his contribution to Peruvian cultural and historical knowledge and understanding.

He has written 150 journal articles and book chapters and authored or edited 11 books including Craft Production in Complex Societies (2007), Andean Ceramics: Technology, Organization and Approaches (1998), Cultura Sicán (1995), and Pampa Grande and the Mochica Culture (1994).

Please visit the websites of the Sicán Archaeological Project and Pachacamac Archaeological Poject at at www.sican.org and www.pachacamac.net, respectively.

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