Frances Hayashida

Director
fmh@unm.edu

Frances grew up in Honolulu, Hawaii, and left when she started college. She received her BA and MA from Stanford University and her PhD from the University of Michigan, all in anthropology. She is an archaeologist and has worked primarily in Peru and Chile, as well as Zacatecas, Mexico; Zuñi, New Mexico; northern California; and southern Hungary. 

The main focus of her research is the political ecology of late prehispanic societies in the Andes, and what happened to local people, their water, and landscapes when they were forcibly incorporated into the Inka Empire. For the past 20 years she has been studying these dynamics in arid environments, first on the north coast of Peru and more recently in the high-altitude Atacama Desert, where she co-directs an interdisciplinary project with colleagues from the University of Chile and the Spanish National Research Council.