Dr. Katherine A Miller Wolf

Dr. Katherine Miller Wolf is a bioarchaeologist, Registered Professional Archaeologist (#47012451), and UWF associate professor of Anthropology. She specializes in the study of skeletal remains from archaeological sites to answer cultural questions about the past.

Dr. Miller Wolf is the recipient of a prestigious 2020 Fulbright U.S. Scholar grant to Honduras for ongoing research of the largest collection of ancient Maya human skeletal remains yet recovered in Mesoamerica and to teach bioarchaeological field and laboratory methods to students from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Honduras (UNAH).

Dr. Miller Wolf is active in field projects dating from 250 -1100 AD in the prehistoric period in northern Belize (Maya Research Program), Ucanal, Guatemala (Ucanal Archaeological Project), Tayasal and San Bernabé in Flores, Guatemala (Tayasal Archaeological Project), and at Copan for an elite Late Classic Residence (The PICASS project). Additionally, she has a project on remains from a Colonial cemetery in Belize City, Belize dating from 1700-1918 AD.

On Jan. 4, 2020, Dr. Miller Wolf was awarded the 2020 Archaeological Institute of America Conservation and Heritage Management Award for her conservation work in Copan.

Her fieldwork in Honduras began in 2004, when she launched a massive conservation project involving more than 1,200 human skeletal remains in Copan, Honduras. Since then, she has conducted archaeological fieldwork in Copan, Honduras to understand what life was like for the ancient Maya. In 2015, Dr. Miller Wolf was invited to teach an intensive summer course on physical anthropology at UNAH; the first course ever taught by a bioarchaeologist in the country.

She has also conducted research on skeletal samples from the early Holocene Gobero Site in Niger that dates from 8000-5000 years ago and Mississippian and Woodland sites in the Lower Illinois River Valley (Schild, Koster, YokEm, and Klunk Mounds).

To serve her discipline, Dr. Miller Wolf was a Science Advisor to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for the DoSER program and was a guest editor of a special issue on skeletal conservation in the Journal of Advances in Archaeological Practice (Issue 7(1) 2019).