Associate Curator in Archaeology, Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida
Ph.D., Anthropology, Univ. of Florida, 2009
M.A., Anthropology, Univ. of Florida, 2004
A.B., English, Duke University, 2000
Background and Research Interests
After teaching at the University of West Florida for one year, Neill joined the faculty of the Florida Museum of Natural History as Assistant Curator of Florida Archaeology in 2010. His research program is focused on the Woodland period (ca. 1000 B.C. to A.D. 900) and late pre-Columbian archaeology of Florida and Georgia, and in particular seeks to detail histories of development and transformation of pan-regional communities and interaction networks.
Current Research Projects
Neill has directed recent field projects in North Florida and the Gulf coast through the Suwannee Valley Archaeological Field School as well as through occasional collaborations with the Laboratory of Southeastern Archaeology on the Lower Suwannee Archaeological Survey.
With support from NSF and the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and in collaboration with Tom Pluckhahn at the University of South Florida, Sourcing Interaction the Woodland Period Southeast U.S. is a laboratory-based project that investigates Swift Creek Complicated Stamped pottery from several dozen sites distributed across the Gulf Coastal Plain of Florida and Georgia. A combination of geochemistry, mineralogy, digital imaging, technological analysis, and radiocarbon dating are being used to discover specific regional and diachronic trends in mobility and exchange that are evidenced by the distribution of stamped designs.
Recent Publications
- Wallis, Neill J. 2013. The Materiality of Signs: Enchainment and Animacy in Woodland Southeastern North American Pottery. American Antiquity 78:207-226.
- Wallis, Neill J. 2011. The Swift Creek Gift: Vessel Exchange on the Atlantic Coast. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa.
- Wallis, Neill J., Matthew Boulanger, Michael D. Glascock, Jeffrey R. Ferguson. 2010. Woodland Period Ceramic Provenance and the Exchange of Swift Creek Complicated Stamped Pottery in the Southeastern United States. Journal of Archaeological Science 37:2598-2611.
- Wallis, Neill J., Ann S. Cordell, and Lee A. Newsom. 2011. Using Hearths for Temper: Petrographic Analysis of Middle Woodland Charcoal-Tempered Pottery in Northeast Florida. Journal of Archaeological Science 38:2914-2924.
- Wallis, Neill J., and George D. Kamenov. 2013. Challenges in the Analysis of Heterogeneous Pottery by LA-ICP-MS: A Comparison with INAA. Archaeometry 55:893-909.
- Wallis, Neill J., and Asa R. Randall (editors). 2014. New Histories of Precolumbian Florida. University Press of Florida, Gainesville.