Summary
Maria Bruno was born and raised in Zephyr Cove, Nevada and is a proud, third-generation Â鶹ÊÓƵ alum. After completing her B.A. in Anthropology and a minor in Journalism, she went on to obtain her M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. She was a faculty member of the Anthropology and Archaeology Department at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA from 2011-2023 when she relocated to the Reno/Tahoe area. She is delighted to be back in her home state and contributing to the department where she began her career as an anthropologist and archaeologist.
Research interests
Bruno is a cultural anthropologist and archaeologist with focus on the archaeobotany and ethnobotany of Indigenous South America. She has conducted archaeological and ethnographic field work on the development of agriculture in the Lake Titicaca Basin of Bolivia since the early 2000s. Her research has contributed to greater understanding of the domestication of the Andean chenopods, quinoa and kañawa, Indigenous, small-holder intensification strategies, and the trajectories of early social-political developments in the region. She is currently the co-director of the Taraco Archaeological Project. In addition, she has done archaeological and archaeobotanical work in the Amazon Basin of Bolivia, and was an undergraduate member of the Artemisia Research Project conducting archaeological survey in southern Oregon.
Selected publications
Books
Maria C. Bruno
2024 Growing the Taraco Peninsula: Past and present indigenous agricultural landscapes of Lake Titicaca, Bolivia. Boulder: University Press of Colorado.
Sayre, Matthew P. and Maria C. Bruno, Editors
2017 Social Perspectives on Ancient Lives from Paleoethnobotanical Data, Springer: Cham, Switzerland.
Articles
Maria C. Bruno
2023 Archaeobotanical Insights into Kañawa (Chenopodium pallidicaule Aellen) Domestication: A Rustic Seed Crop of the Andean Altiplano. Agronomy 13(8):2085
Bruno, Maria C., José M. Capriles, Christine A. Hastorf, Sherilyn Fritz, D. Marie Weide, Alejandra I. Domic, and Paul Baker
2021 The rise and fall of Wiñaymarka: Rethinking Cultural and Environmental Interactions in the Southern Basin of Lake Titicaca. Human Ecology 49:131-145.
Hastrof, Christine A. and Maria C. Bruno
2020 The flavors archaeobotany forgot. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology. 59:101189.
Bruno, Maria C.
2014 Beyond Raised Fields: Exploring Farming Practices and Processes of Agricultural Change in the Ancient Lake Titicaca Basin of Bolivia. American Anthropologist 116(1):1-16.
Bruno, Maria C.
2011 Farmers’ Experience and Knowledge: Utilizing Soil Diversity to Overcome Rainfall Variability on the Taraco Peninsula, Bolivia. In Sustainable Lifeways: Cultural Persistence in an
Ever-changing Environment. Edited by Naomi Miller, Katherine Moore, and Kathleen Ryan. pp. 210-243. Penn Museum International Conference Series, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia.
Bruno, Maria C.
2006 A Morphological Approach to Documenting Chenopodium Domestication in the Andes. In Documenting Domestication: New Genetic and Archaeological Paradigms. Edited by Melinda
Zeder, Daniel Bradley, Eve Emshwiller, and Bruce D. Smith, pp. 32-45, University of California Press, Berkeley.
Courses taught
- ANTH 101: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology
- ANTH 102: Introduction to Biological Anthropology
- ANTH 201: Peoples and Cultures of the World
- ANTH 443/643: Environmental Archaeology
- ANTH 431/631: Plants and People
Education
- Ph.D., Anthropology, Washington University in St. Louis, 2008
- M.A., Anthropology, Washington University in St. Louis, 2001
- B.A., Anthropology, Â鶹ÊÓƵ, 1998