Quick Facts
Biography
Barbara Voss (born 1967) is an American historical archaeologist. Her work focuses on cross-cultural encounters, particularly the Spanish colonization of the Americas and Overseas Chinese communities in the 19th century, as well as queer theory in archaeology and gender archaeology. She is an associate professor of anthropology at Stanford University.
Education and career
Voss graduated from Stanford University in 1988, where she earned the Michelle Rosaldo Prize for Research in Feminist Anthropology (1987), the Presidential Award for Academic Excellence (1986, 1987), and the Boothe Prize (1986). In 2002, after working as a field archaeologist for some years, she obtained a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation was entitled The Archaeology of El Presidio de San Francisco: Culture Contact, Gender, and Ethnicity in a Spanish-colonial Military Community.
Since 2001, Voss has taught at Stanford.
Archaeology of gender and sexuality
Voss is a proponent of feminist archaeology, as well as the use of queer studies and sexuality studies in archaeology. In her work on the Spanish-colonial military settlement of El Presidio de San Francisco, Voss showed how the regulation of sex was an important part of Spanish colonization. This was accomplished through architecture, particularly the building of missions and military fortifications, which limited Native Californian sexuality by creating gender segregated spaces.
Overseas Chinese communities
Since 2002, Voss has served as the director of the Market Street Chinatown Archaeology Project, a community archaeology project investigating a historical Overseas Chinese enclave in San Jose. Archaeobotanical analysis of the excavated soil by Voss' team has revealed that the diet of the community was not entirely Chinese but also included western cuts of meats and local produce.
In her work on Chinatowns, Voss has the critiqued a tendency toward Orientalism in previous scholarship, in which Chinese immigrants are seen as always engaged in the a conflict between a 'traditional' East and a 'modern' West. Questioning the stereotype of Chinatowns as insular and traditional, she argues that this assumption has limited conclusions about these communities to questions of assimilation and acculturation. For Voss, the boundaries between Chinatowns and their surrounding communities have always been fluid, with close interactions between Chinese and non-Chinese residents. Voss has also argued for a transpacific archaeology which traces the global connections between Chinatowns in the Americas, other Overseas Chinese communities, and China.
Politics
In the wake of the 2016 U.S Presidential election, Voss established 'Archaeologists for a Just Future', a Facebook-based advocacy group.