Smithsonian Journeys Experts

Dr. Suzanne Pilaar Birch is an archaeologist whose work advances our understanding of human resilience to climate and environmental change in prehistory. She holds a B.Sc. in Evolutionary Anthropology and Human Paleoecology from Rutgers University, and an MPhil in Archaeological Science and PhD in Archaeology from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Gates Cambridge Scholar. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University before joining the University of Georgia, where she is an associate professor with a joint appointment in the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Geography.

Dr. Pilaar Birch combines the study of animal bones and biogeochemistry to investigate changes in diet, mobility, and settlement systems in the period spanning the end of the last ice age through the spread of agricultural lifestyles in the circum-Mediterranean region. 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 in the course of her career.

She wrote and recorded the 20-episode series Early Humans: Ice, Stone, and Survival, now streaming on Wondrium and available as an audiobook on Audible. She has published over 35 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters and been awarded over half a million dollars in research funding from sources including the National Science Foundation, National Geographic, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the UK. She edited the book Multispecies Archaeology and is currently writing two popular audience books, Animal Bone Detectives (MIT Kids/Candlewick Press) and Life Before Agriculture (Princeton University Press).

She is one of the co-founders of the non-profit organization TrowelBlazers (www.trowelblazers.com), which highlights the contributions of women, past and present, in archaeology, paleontology, and geology.