Bio

Dr. Jessi J. Halligan is the Associate Director of the Center, an Associate Professor of Anthropology, and holds the Chair in First American Studies. She arrived at the Center in January 2024 from Florida State University. She specializes in the archaeology of drowned landscapes and the initial peopling of the Americas during the end of the Pleistocene. She currently is directing projects on late Pleistocene and early Holocene archaeological sites in the Aucilla River Basin in northwestern Florida, co-directing a submerged landscape survey in Lake Erie, and co-directing a collaborative project with the Bureau of Ocean and Energy Management to revise the Gulf of Mexico submerged pre-Contact archaeological survey guidelines. She has more than 30 years of professional archaeology experience, having directed projects on the Great Plains, the Midwest, Texas, and the Northeastern US, in addition to her current research in the Gulf region and the Great Lakes. She is co-author for the first textbook of maritime and underwater archaeology (published by Oxford University Press) and her research has been published in Science, Science Advances, World Archaeology, and the Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology, amongst others, and has been publicly reported in over a hundred national and international news outlets. In 2023, she received the Southeastern Archaeology Conference’s Rising Scholar Award and a Graduate Teaching Award from Florida State University.