Assistant Professor, Department of Geography and the Environment
Amy E. Thompson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Texas at Austin. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico in 2019 and was a Bass Postdoctoral Fellow at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, IL from 2020-2021. Dr. Thompson is trained as an anthropological archaeologist whose research evaluates inequality and human-environment interactions among the Classic Maya (300–900 C..E) through settlement patterns, spatial modeling and lidar analysis, and household archaeology. Since 2008, she has conducted research in southern Belize working alongside indigenous Mopan and Q’eqchi’ Maya communities and engaging in a community-based archaeology. She also conducts research in northwest Belize and in western Honduras at the UNESCO World Heritage site of Copan. Her work relies heavily on geospatial methods, including GIS, remote sensing, and LiDAR, and multi-proxy chronology building to understand household decision-making and inherited inequality through a lens of Human Behavioral Ecology. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Explorer’s Club, the Society for American Archaeology, and the Copan Maya Foundation. Her work has been published in more than a dozen peer-reviewed journal articles in venues such as the Journal of Archaeological Science, the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, Progress in Physical Geography, and PLOS ONE.