Kaitlin Brown

Dr. Kaitlin Brown studies the ways communities negotiate belonging, identity, and place through moments of displacement, settlement, and cultural transformation. Her research centers on Indigenous–colonial interactions across successive waves of settler colonialism in North America by examining how Native communities navigated changing social, political, and economic conditions while sustaining their relationships to land and kinship networks and maintaining broader cultural knowledge.
Tracing these processes from the deep past into the present, her work increasingly engages contemporary issues. This present-oriented perspective grounds her ongoing partnerships with tribal nations today and offers a reflexive framework for engaging in archaeology as a social practice. Methodologically, she draws on collaborative and community-centered approaches, including community-based participatory research (CBPR), ethnographic archaeologies and the "anthropology of archaeology," oral history, and low-impact excavation strategies.
Her teaching reflects these commitments by encouraging students to critically examine how archaeological knowledge is produced, whose perspectives are prioritized, and how the discipline can be practiced more ethically and responsibly.