Joan Gero is Professor Emerita of Anthropology from American University and a Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology in the Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian. She is also a lifelong fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge, and has taught at the universities of Cambridge, Uppsala (Sweden), Catamarca (Argentina), Magdalena (Colombia) and the University of South Carolina. She has conducted archaeological excavations in the Andes (Peru and Argentina) since 1985 with grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Science Foundation, Fulbright, the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Heintz Foundation. As a pioneer scholar of gender in prehistory, she has authored dozens of articles and book chapters in professional journals and books. In 2003, she served as Academic Secretary of the Fifth World Archaeological Congress, and was head series editor of the One World Archaeology book series.