Lewis Borck

Archaeology Southwest’s seventh fellow in the signature Preservation Fellowship graduated with his Ph.D. from the University of Arizona in Spring 2016. Dr. Borck’s research contributes to Archaeology Southwest’s long-term quest to understand more about the lives of Southwest peoples in the centuries just before Europeans arrived.

A preservation fellow since 2013, Lewis has worked in the Southwest since 2005. Although he has excavated in diverse places, from historic slaughterhouses in Wisconsin to 900-year old copper smelting furnaces in Peru’s northern deserts, Lewis says he “always ends up back in the dust and the sunsets of the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts.” Dr. Borck uses the archaeological record to examine how social movements shaped religion and politics (which are often entangled) through time. He uses a combination of social and spatial analyses, or geosocial analyses, to conduct his studies and draws on a wide-range of data with a focus on ceramic and settlement structure.