Archaeology of the African Holocene

Shayla Monroe received her PhD in anthropology from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), in 2021. She specializes in faunal analysis, the social zooarchaeology of Sudan and Egypt, and the archaeology of African pastoralism. Monroe earned her MA in anthropology from UCSB in 2015. Since 2013, she has worked as an archaeologist at the third Cataract of the Nile River in Sudan, first at the Egyptian colonial site at Tombos, and then at the Kerma hinterlands site, Abu Fatima, also in northern Sudan. Monroe began her career at Howard University, where she earned degrees in anthropology and English (2012). She also spent two seasons (2010 and 2011) working at L'Hermitage plantation (also known as the Best Farm Slave Village) with the National Park Service in Frederick, Maryland. Monroe's present research focuses on mapping social networks and relationships among pastoralists in the Middle Nile Valley and adjacent regions from the Late Neolithic to the end of the Bronze Age.