Rate My Professor Madeleine McLeester

Madeleine McLeester is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Dartmouth College, where she serves as an environmental archaeologist investigating anthropogenic landscapes, plant collection, human-environment entanglements, early colonial encounters, and sports. Her research specializes in ancient agricultural practices in marginal environments in precontact eastern North America, employing pollen and stable isotopic approaches alongside historical record analyses that draw on datasets ranging from aerial photography to ethnobotanical texts. McLeester earned her B.A. from The College at the University of Chicago, followed by an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago's Department of Anthropology in 2017. Her career includes a Postdoctoral Scholar position at the University of Notre Dame from 2017 to 2020 and a Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer role at Dartmouth College starting in 2020, leading to her current faculty appointment.

Currently, McLeester directs a collaborative archaeological field project with the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin, in addition to projects in Michigan and Maine. Her scholarship has been supported by awards such as the Goodman Fund from Dartmouth College's Anthropology Department in 2021, the Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant in 2017, and the NSF-funded Spatial Archaeometry Research Collaboration Award in 2019. Key publications include the 2025 article 'Archaeological evidence of intensive indigenous agriculture in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, USA' in Science, the co-edited volume Finding Fields: The Archaeology of Agricultural Landscapes published in 2024 by the Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association, 'Enduring Legacies of Agriculture: Long-term Vegetation Impacts of Ancestral Menominee Agriculture, Wisconsin, USA' in Ethnobiology Letters in 2023, and 'Paleoclimate of the Little Ice Age to the Present in the Kankakee Valley of Illinois and Indiana, USA Based on 18O/16O Isotope Ratios of Freshwater Shells' in Environmental Archaeology in 2020. She has also co-authored works such as 'Finding Fields: Locating Archaeological Agricultural Landscapes using Historical Aerial Photography' in American Antiquity in 2021. McLeester's contributions challenge long-standing assumptions about Indigenous agricultural systems and their environmental impacts.