Join us on Thursday, October 16th at 4pm in the library atrium for a fcaulty lecture by Dr. Nathaniel Kitchel!

Dr. Nathaniel Kitchel is an assistant professor in the Noreen Stonor Drexel Cultural and Historic Preservation Program, Department of Cultural, Environmental and Global Studies at Salve Regina University. He is an archaeologist interested in how human groups navigate novel or extreme environmental and social circumstances such as rapid climate change and the settlement of uninhabited lands. Much of Dr. Kitchel's research takes place in New England where he investigates the lives of the first human inhabitants of the region during the Pleistocene (Ice Age) and how these communities adapted to rapid climate warming at the end of the Ice Age. Beyond this primary research focus he has also participated in archaeological work in Mongolia, Uzbekistan, Peru and Antartica. Dr. Kitchel also co-directs the Salve Regina archaeological field school at an Ice Age archaeological site in the woods of northern Maine. He earned his PhD in anthropology at the University of Wyoming, master's degree at Northern Arizona University, and B.A. at Colorado State University.

He wrote about this lecture: In science, governance, and popular culture Antarctica is almost universally portrayed as a land unaltered and unspoiled by human activities. The notion of the pre-European arrival of humans there is, at best, the realm of jokes, and at worst, conspiracy theories. There has been, however, little archaeological research undertaken in Antarctica, leaving assumptions about when the continent was first settled, by whom, and for what purpose unexamined. To more thoroughly examine the early human history of the southern continent Dr. Nathaniel Kitchel, assistant professor in the Noreen Stonor Drexel Cultural and Historic Preservation Program joined an expedition to the South Shetland Islands (Antartica) led by Dr. Jesse Casana, W.J. Bryant 1925 Professor of Anthropology at Dartmouth College in January and February of 2025 (the Austral summer). In this talk Dr. Kitchel will discuss his experiences on this voyage beyond the end of the world, including crossing the Drake Passage, traversing uncharted waters in a dinghy, conducting archaeological survey in a tierra nullis, and some of the results of this work. This presentation will also highlight the stunning, stark, yet delicate beauty of the South Shetland islands.