Sarah Newman

Sarah Newman is an anthropological archaeologist whose work integrates archaeological, historical, and art historical methods to investigate anthropological and environmental questions. Her research focuses on themes such as waste and reuse, long-term landscape transformation, and human-animal relationships, with a primary regional emphasis on Mesoamerica and the ancient Maya. Her book Unmaking Waste (2023) challenges the universality of the concept of waste by exploring its cultural and historical variability across Europe and the Americas. Her current project, Animal Archaeology, applies archaeological approaches to non-human species, asking how concepts like style and architecture might be used to explore deep animal histories. Newman co-directs the Invisible Landscapes project, a global collaborative effort examining anthropogenic landscapes using interdisciplinary and multi-scalar methods. This project connects to her fieldwork in Jordan, where she studies ancient water management and its entanglement with ritual and environmental systems. She also investigates how ancient peoples, especially the Maya, organized zoological and natural historical knowledge, while critically examining how scholars interpret such systems today.