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Biography

Education: Ph.D. Anthropology, University of New Mexico, 1992
Interests: Southwest prehistory, Archaic period, lithic technology, cultural resource management

Dr. Vierra received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of New Mexico in 1992. He is currently an adjunct professor at New Mexico State University, and is a recipient of the 2019 New Mexico State Historic Preservation Award. Most recently he was the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer at the Pueblo de San Ildefonso. Over the past forty years he has conducted pure and applied research in archaeology, most of which has been done in the American Southwest and northern Mexico. However, he has also worked in California, Washington, and Texas, as well as France, Portugal and Senegal.

His research interests include hunter-gatherer archeology, stone tool technology, origins of agriculture, Archaic in the American Southwest and Mesolithic in Southwest Europe. The University of Utah Press recently published his edited volume entitled The Archaic Southwest: Foragers in an Arid Land (2018). He has also edited the monographs From Mountaintop to Valley Bottom: Understanding Past Land Use in the Northern Rio Grande Valley, New Mexico (2013), and The Late Archaic Across the Borderlands: Foraging to Farming (2005), and co-edited a book with Dr. Bousman entitled From the Pleistocene to the Holocene: Human Organization and Cultural Transformations in Prehistoric North America (2012).