Rate My Professor Traci Ardren

Traci Ardren is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Miami. She received her B.A. in Anthropology from New College of Florida in 1988 and her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Yale University in 1997. As an anthropological archaeologist, her research examines New World prehistoric cultures, focusing on issues of identity, gender, social memory, plants, foodways, and symbolic communication, particularly in ancient Maya society and ancestral Indigenous communities of the Florida Keys. Ardren co-directs the Proyecto de Interacción Política del Centro de Yucatán, which investigates how the construction of the longest Maya road influenced life along its route, including sites like Coba, Yaxuna, Xuenkal, and Chunchucmil. She also directs the Matecumbe Chiefdom Project, conducting archaeological surveys and excavations in the Florida Keys since 2009 to document pre-contact social and political organization before sites erode due to sea-level rise.

Ardren's scholarly contributions include authoring books such as Ancient Maya Women (2002), The Social Experience of Childhood in Ancient Mesoamerica (2006), and Social Identities in the Classic Maya Northern Lowlands: Gender, Age, Memory, and Place (2005), as well as Everyday Life in the Classic Maya World (2023). She has edited influential volumes including The Maya World (2020) and Her Cup for Sweet Cacao: Food in Ancient Maya Society (2020). Her articles, such as 'Studies of Gender in the Prehispanic Americas' (2008) and 'Chronology Building in the Ancestral Florida Keys' (2025), reflect her broad impact, with over 2,200 citations on Google Scholar. Ardren received a residential fellowship from Dumbarton Oaks in spring 2018 for her project 'Go in Pairs, Intertwined: Soft Technologies and the Role of Plants in Classic Maya Identity.' She has served as department chair since 2013, advanced to full professor in 2014, and contributes to public outreach through lectures like the Cooper Fellow Lecture on wild fruits in pre-Columbian South Florida (2025) and book talks at the University of Miami.