Johanna Pacyga

Historical archaeology, colonialism, women’s labor, community building, missionization, archives, human-plant relationships, historical ecology. West Africa, North America, Caribbean.

As an historical archaeologist, Johanna Pacyga’s research combines archaeological, archival, art historical, and botanical research. In her research, she examines the interconnections between gender, race, ethnicity, and religion in the Atlantic World across the 18^th, 19^th, and early 20^th centuries.

Dr. Pacyga’s most recent project focuses on women’s labor, religious conversion, and community-building in francophone West Africa (Ngazobil, Senegal), where she excavated the Convent of the Daughters of the Holy Heart of Mary and the village of Saint-Joseph at the Mission of St. Joseph. Her work there reveals the complex relationships between African and European missionary women, in the context of the first congregation of Catholic African religious sisters who built a uniquely African Catholic community. She emphasizes the agency and projects of those women and girls, and their impacts in shaping a new type of community rather than merely classifying them as colonial subjects entangled in the mechanisms of European missionization. 

She is also in the early stages of an archaeobotanical project, analyzing macrobotanical remains from villages across the former Kingdom of Siin in Senegal. This study seeks a first glimpse at regional archaeobotanical data directly related to agriculture and horticulture during the Atlantic and colonial eras. Comparative analysis will examine differences in botanical resource use over time, between coastal and interior sites, and between mission and non-mission sites, lending insight into changing transatlantic, regional, and local economies and ecologies between 1500 and 1930, as well as the shifting landscape of cultivation and extraction.

Beyond West Africa, Dr. Pacyga has worked in North America, the Caribbean, and the Mediterranean. Connecting threads include inquiry into postcolonial approaches to gendered labor, foodways, Indigenous knowledges, human-plant relationships, colonial commodities, and how people—across time and space—have built and nurtured community and materially crafted their identities.

“A Biography of Place: Thinking between Text, Practice, and Space at the Mission of St. Joseph, Senegal.” Historical Archaeology 57, no. 3 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41636-023-00425-z.

“The Archaeology of Missionization in Colonial Senegambia.” In Oxford Encyclopedia of African Archaeology, edited by Shadreck Chirikure. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190854584.013.512.

“Pythons in Paris: Fear and Desire in the French Empire.” The Journal of the Western Society for French History. Vol. 43 (2015):145-154. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0642292.0043.013

• Ancient Civilizations (ANTH 150)
• Ancient Civilizations Honors Seminar (ANTH 150H)
• North American Archaeology (ANTH 269)
• Historical Archaeology (ANTH 326)
• Archaeology of Food (ANTH 327)
• Archaeobotany (ANTH 390B)
• Making Plants Work (ANTH 390M)

Ph.D., Anthropology, The University of Chicago (2022)
Advisors: Shannon L. Dawdy, François G. Richard, Kathleen D. Morrison
Title: “Cultivating Catholicism: Gender, Vocation, and Missionization in Colonial Senegal”

M.A., History of Decorative Arts and Design, The New School (2010)

B.A., Archaeology, Boston University (2006)