Welcome, Professor Darryl Wilkinson!

Among the 30 new tenured or tenure-track faculty members that Dartmouth welcomed to the College community this year is Assistant Professor of Religion Darryl Wilkinson. Professor Wilkinson earned his B.A. and M.St. degrees at Oxford, and his Ph.D. at Columbia, and his work focusses on the archaeology of religion in the Indigenous Americas (especially Peru and New Mexico), including both the ancient and colonial periods. His research examines the material culture (e.g., art, iconography, ceramics, and architecture) of Indigenous societies, particularly the Incas, and uses such evidence to better understand their ritual interactions with the wider landscape.   

When asked by the Dartmouth News to comment about curiosity, Prof. Wilkinson said, "Archaeology is a process in which we have to try to understand past worlds from the very limited and partial fragments that survive in the present. When the worlds in question existed thousands of years ago, and contained cultures that thought about things in a very different way from modern people, it becomes an even more challenging process. As an archaeologist, I often find myself faced with patterns in the evidence that people left behind, and puzzling over how to make sense of it all. Unless you are inherently curious about the missing pieces, it is difficult to find that kind of work intellectually engaging. It is a bit like having a jigsaw that will never be complete, and so you constantly find yourself wondering about what sort of pictures could be made by filling in the blank spaces in different ways."

This Winter Term, Prof. Wilkinson has been teaching REL 3.01, Indigenous Religions of the Americas, and in the Spring Term, he'll be teaching REL 1.08, The Religion of Things (at the 10-hour). Welcome, Darryl Wilkinson!