Bruce Owen is a Research Associate at the Archaeological Research Facility at UC Berkeley and an Archaeologist/Editor at the Anthropological Studies Center (ASC) at Sonoma State University. He has a Ph.D. in Anthropology from UCLA (1993) and taught in the Anthropology department at Sonoma State through 2017. His research has focused on Peru, especially the coastal and upper Osmore valley (Ilo and Moquegua), the coastal and middle Majes valley (Camaná and the site of Beringa, near Aplao), and the upper Mantaro valley, near Jauja, focusing on the Middle Horizon through the Late Horizon, with forays back to the Formative and up into post-contact times to pursue questions mostly about historical processes in complex and multiethnic societies including population movements, status differences, changing political and economic organization and conflict, and pre-Columbian metal production and exchange. His methodological approaches range from systematic surface survey and excavation in domestic and mortuary contexts through GIS data management and analysis, topographic modelling using drone and old aerial photography images, radiocarbon dating and Bayesian modeling, ceramic analysis, and nonparametric statistical analyses of artifact patterning. At the ASC, he has conducted statistical analyses of historic-era artifact data from large-scale CRM projects in 19th-century San Francisco and Oakland, synthesized radiocarbon, obsidian-hydration, shell-isotope, and stratigraphic data in a large Upper Archaic site, and edited and contributed to many other survey and data-recovery reports. He has served as the Secretary and Treasurer of the Institute of Andean Studies for the past decade, and is currently working on multiple datasets collected by the Upper Mantaro Archaeological Research Project in the 1980s for new analyses and archiving.
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