Associate Research Professor, School of Human Evolution and Social Change, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Center for Archaeology & Society Repository

SHESC Themes: Culture, Heritage and Identity

Field Specializations: Archaeology, Ceramic Technology, Quantitative Methods, Social Organization

Regional Focus: North America (Southwest)

Bio

Research:
Arleyn Simon has interests in the study of prehistoric social organization and craft production through technological and compositional analysis of ceramics and other artifacts; materials science; and quantitative methods. She currently directs the activities of the CAS Repository, including collection management and research projects. Previously, she was the laboratory director for the Roosevelt Platform Mound Study (1989-1998). She has directed field projects in the U.S. Southwest (Arizona) and Northern Plains (North Dakota, Montana, South Dakota and Wyoming). Simon is a faculty associate of the ASU Center for Solid State Science (CSSS) and the Partnership for Research in Spatial Modeling (PRISM). She past president of the Society for Archaeological Sciences.

Simon's research actively uses compositional and physical analysis of material artifacts, such as ceramics, stone tools and fine goods (turquoise and obsidian) for the purpose of identifying prehistoric exchange networks and production loci on both inter-regional and intra-regional scales using quantitative analysis. She is involved in interdisciplinary research using geology, chemistry and materials science. Most recently, she was a co-PI on an interdisciplinary multi-year NSF grant through PRISM for the development of an artifact digital archive and a visual query interface for shape-based search and classification purposes.