Faculty Emeritus
Meso-American Art & Art History
Ph.D Harvard University
MA, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
BA, The University of Mississippi
email: sasisson@olemiss.edu
As a graduate student at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and Harvard University, I conducted research on the Maya at Palenque, Chiapas and on the Olmec in the Western Chontalpa, Tabasco. Prior to returning to the University of Mississippi, my undergraduate institution; I was engaged in teaching and contract archaeology at the University of Utah and Curator at the R.S. Peabody Foundation in Andover, Massachusetts. As Curator my primary responsibility was research on the Late Postclassic Period in the Tehuacan Valley, Puebla, Mexico. I also taught an introductory anthropology course for the high school students at Phillips Academy and took them on trips of discovery to Mexico. At the University of Utah, my primary responsibility was overseeing contract archaeological research. Currently I teach introductory courses in anthropology for lower division undergraduates and upper division courses on the Maya, Aztec, and Mesoamerican Art History. I consider the latter my area of special expertise. I enjoy teaching the former because I believe it important for undergraduates to be exposed to the rational, diverse cultural practices of other peoples with world views different from their own. I hope that the experience will challenge them to critically examine their own values and assumptions about the world.
Research:
My research focuses on the Late Postclassic Period in the Tehuacan Valley, Puebla, Mexico and the local consequences of that valley’s incorporation into the Aztec Empire and subsequently into New Spain.