Dr. Luke F. Kaiser is a Visiting Assistant Professor whose research utilizes ceramic analysis, cooperation theory, and collective action to investigate the development and maintenance of social institutions in pre-state and state level society. He is an Assistant Director at the Bronze Age site of Mochlos, East Crete, Greece, where he is a ceramic specialist for the Early and Late Bronze Age periods and co-directs a field school for undergraduate volunteers through the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
During his 15 years at Mochlos, he has led the fragmentary pottery study of material that is presented in Mochlos IVA. Period III. The House of the Metal Merchant and Other Buildings in the Neopalatial Town (INSTAP Press, 2022) and its forthcoming ceramic companion volume (in preparation). He has also led the fragmentary study of the ceramic material for the forthcoming volume, Mochlos VA. Period III. The Ceremonial Complex and Other Buildings in the Neopalatial Town (in press) and is co-authoring the ceramic companion volume (in preparation). These volumes illustrate how essential anthropological theory is in the interpretation of ceramic datasets from prehistoric societies.
Dr. Kaiser has a deep connection to Crete, having lived and worked there over the last 15 years. Every summer, he co-directs a four week field school where students learn the fundamentals of ceramic analysis, excavation, conservation, and the curation of legacy and modern excavation data simultaneously. Additionally, the project focuses on providing students with not only an archaeological experience but also a cultural one, placing students face to face with the people and landscape of modern and ancient Crete.
A core aspect of Dr. Kaiser’s research is the role that tradition plays as the foundation for institutions, both ancient and modern. To have a tangible, lasting impact in a society, institutions need a degree of precedent. When they drift from that tradition, however, some individuals seeking to take advantage of the services provided by these institutions may be willing to accept some changes to their daily life while others may resist them in favor of maintaining their traditional norms and values. Dr. Kaiser’s research seeks to address the following questions: How essential is the concept of “tradition” to the foundation of an institution?Do all successful institutions create collective action through cooperative measures alone? What role does coercion have in this process, and how effective is it over the long run? How long does it take for a nascent institution to become a traditional one? And what does it look like when a subset of society or even a society as a whole resists these changes?Dr. Kaiser received two BA’s (Classical Archaeology and English; Interdisciplinary Archaeology) from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He went on to the University of Arizona where he earned an MA in Anthropology with a concentration in Mediterranean Archaeology and a PhD in Anthropology. He also took a number of classes at the graduate and undergraduate level in Geographic Information and Environmental Studies. He lives in Greensboro with his wife, Jessie, who is a data scientist for the Census Bureau, and their two Shih Tzus, Gimli and Chester. In his free time, he enjoys acting as a climbing apparatus for his thirteen nieces and nephews, going to the gym, making music, playing video games, cooking/baking, 3-D printing and modeling, and watching anime with Jessie and the puppy boys.