Dr. Suzanne Pilaar Birch is an archaeologist who works to advance our understanding of human resilience to climate and environmental change in prehistory. An associate professor anthropology and geography at the University of Georgia, she combines the study of animal bones and biogeochemistry to investigate changes in diet, mobility, and settlement systems from the last ice age to the early agricultural era. Her research has taken her from Turkey to Croatia, Kazakhstan, China, Italy, Cyprus, and most recently, Jordan. She has visited 27 countries across six continents over the course of her career.

Suzanne wrote and recorded the 20-episode series Early Humans: Ice, Stone, and Survival for The Great Courses and has published more than 35 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters. She has been awarded research funding from sources including the National Science Foundation, National Geographic, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the United Kingdom. She edited the book Multispecies Archaeology and is currently writing two popular audience books, Animal Bone Detectives and Life Before Agriculture.

Suzanne co-founded the non-profit organization TrowelBlazers, which highlights the contributions of women past and present in archaeology, paleontology, and geology. She was a Gates Cambridge Scholar at the University of Cambridge, where she earned a PhD in archaeology, and a postdoctoral fellow at Brown University’s Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World.