Rate My Professor Matthew Sayre

Matthew Sayre is Chair and Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at High Point University, part of the Douglas S. Witcher School of Humanities and Behavioral Sciences. He earned his B.A. in Latin American Studies and Anthropology from the University of Chicago, followed by an M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to his current role, Sayre served as Associate Professor at the University of South Dakota and as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University. In the summer of 2014, he was a visiting scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. He has conducted archaeological fieldwork in Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Turkey, and Spain.

Sayre's research specializes in paleoethnobotany, ancient agriculture, ritual and consumption practices, economic exchanges, and adaptations to climate change among past cultures of the Central Andes, with primary fieldwork at the UNESCO World Heritage site of Chavín de Huántar in Peru since 2002. He co-edited the book Social Perspectives on Ancient Lives from Paleoethnobotanical Data (Springer, 2017) with Maria Bruno. Key publications include "Llamas on the Land: Production and Consumption of Meat at Chavín de Huántar, Peru" (Latin American Antiquity 27(4): 497-511, 2016, with Silvana A. Rosenfeld); "Isotopic evidence for the trade and production of exotic marine mammal bone artifacts at Chavín de Huántar, Peru" (Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences 8(2): 403-417, 2016, with Melanie J. Miller and Silvana A. Rosenfeld); "You can’t grow Potatoes in the Sky: Agriculture and Climate Change in Andean Peru" (Culture, Agriculture, Food, and Environment 39(2): 100-108, 2017, with Tammy Stenner and Alejandro Argumedo); "A Marked Preference: Chicha de Molle and Huari State Consumption Practices" (Ñawpa Pacha 32(2): 231-258, 2012, with David Goldstein, William Whitehead, and Patrick Williams); and "A River Runs through it: Ritual and Inequality in the La Banda Sector of Chavín de Huantar" in Reconsidering the Chavín Phenomenon in the Twenty-First Century (Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University Press, 2023, with S. Rosenfeld). His contributions also extend to sustainability education, digital archaeology, and cultural heritage management.