Sonya Atalay

Sonya Lynn Atalay (Anishinaabe-Ojibwe) is an anthropological archaeologist noted for her research into Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS); applying community-based research, working with Indigenous Peoples in order to develop a deeper understanding into community-based protection and management of cultural sites. Atalay has contributed to her field through numerous publications and research projects and through her role as a public figure and professor of anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Education

Sonya Atalay studied a B.A. in Anthropology and Classical Archaeology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 1991, followed by an M.A. in Anthropology at the University of California Berkeley in 1998. In 2003, Atalay went on to complete her PhD in Anthropology at the same institution for work on Çatalhöyük supervised by Ruth Tringham. Atalay continued on as a Postdoctoral Fellow at University of California, Berkeley from 2003 to 2005. She accepted a position as a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University from 2005 to 2007, focused on developing Community-Based Participatory Research.

Career

From 2007 to 2012 Sonya Atalay served as an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies at Indiana University. In 2012, Atalay was hired as an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at University of Massachusetts Amherst, later promoted to Associate Professor in 2014. As of 2025, she is a provost professor at UMass Amherst and a Professor of Anthropology at MIT. She is also the Director and Co-Primary Investigator at the Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Science (CBIKS) on the MIT campus.

Indigenous Archaeology

Following her PhD, Atalay began shifting her focus from Classical archaeology abroad to public archaeology in the United States.