Dr. Stephen E. (Steve) Nash is Archaeology Southwest’s current President and CEO. He joined the staff in January 2024.
Dr. Nash returns to Tucson, where he received his doctorate in Anthropology at the University of Arizona in 1997, from the Denver area, where he has served in a number of senior leadership roles at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science (DMNS) since 2006. At DMNS, Nash has led significant collaborative projects to return belongings to Indigenous North American communities and Indigenous peoples internationally. Born and raised in Chicago, he returned there for a postdoctoral position at the Field Museum in 1997 and subsequently served as the Head of Collections for the museum’s Department of Anthropology from 1999 to 2006. His archaeological research includes dendrochronology (tree-ring dating) in the American Southwest and fieldwork at Indigenous heritage sites in the highlands of west-central New Mexico and east-central Arizona.
Nash is a gifted communicator and successful fundraiser who has won numerous awards and served on a variety of distinguished professional committees. Across his career, he has raised more than $34,000,000 from private and federal sources for projects ranging from research to institutional growth. Since 2015, Steve has written “Curiosities,” a regular column on anthropological topics for SAPIENS, a digital magazine about the study of humanity aimed at general readers. Many of his essays have been republished in popular media, including Discover Magazine, Nautilus, and Atlas Obscura.