Shayla Monroe, Ph.D.

Shayla Monroe is a postdoctoral scholar in Anthropology at University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), where she received her PhD in 2021. She specializes in faunal analysis, the social zooarchaeology of Sudan and Egypt, the archaeology of African pastoralism. Her dissertation analyzes the acquisition of cattle at the ancient Egyptian colonial fortress of Askut (c. 1850-1550 BC) and its implications for culture contact and asymmetrical power relations between pastoralists and non-pastoralists.  Monroe earned her M.A. in Anthropology from UCSB in 2015.  Since 2013, she has worked as an archaeologist at the 3^rd Cataract of the Nile River in Sudan, first at the Egyptian colonial site at Tombos, and then at the Kerma hinterlands site, Abu Fatima, also in northern Sudan.  Monroe began her career at Howard University, where she earned degrees in Anthropology and English (2012).  She also spent two seasons (2010 and 2011) working at L’Hermitage plantation (also known as the Best Farm Slave Village) with the National Park Service in Frederick, Maryland.