Patrícia Rodrigues-Niu

Biography

Patrícia holds a M.A. in Archaeology and Territory and a B.A. in Archaeology and History from the University of Coimbra, Portugal. During this period, Patricia worked as junior researcher in the Coimbra UNESCO World Heritage Center. Her research focused on ceramics, urban archaeology and landscape analysis. In Brazil, she completed a year of graduate course work in the University of São Paulo’s Archaeology and Ethnography program, focusing on Indigenous Archaeology and ethnoarchaeological approaches. She has since been working as a researcher and scientific coordinator of Indigenous cultural documentation projects at the Instituto Homem Brasileiro, a NGO devoted to heritage valorization.

At Notre Dame, Patrícia’s research investigates how Amerindian peoples in Amazonia marshal the past to secure sustainable futures. She seeks to understand how people attribute historical and ecological values and meanings to anthropogenic landscapes, while simultaneously building understandings of themselves within a complex set of changing relations between humans, nonhuman agents, and the environment. Patrícia conducts research among the Wauja, an Arawak group from the Upper-Xingu region, in Southern Amazonia. Her project integrates ethnographic, ethnoarchaeological, and linguistic anthropological methods to examine how Wauja people construct bridges of meaning between material evidence of past occupations and present-day models of territoriality and growth. Patrícia is a Kellogg Institute Fellow and a Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork grantee.