Carla Sinopoli joins UNM as Maxwell Museum’s first female director

Posted: March 13, 2019

Anthropologist and archeologist Dr. Carla Sinopoli has made her way to the University of New Mexico as the Maxwell Museum’s first female museum director.

Sinopoli, who started in October, brings her world-wide archeological experience and acute eye for curation to UNM and hopes to advance the Maxwell Museum to new heights.

Sinopoli’s interest in archeology began during her undergraduate years and continued throughout grad school. She was initially interested in archeology of the Middle East, but upon traveling to India to join an field project, she gained a lifelong interest in south Asian studies.

“I never thought of working in India necessarily, but when I went there the work was amazing, the country was wonderful and I never looked back,” Sinopoli said.

In India, Sinopoli and her team are focusing on a settlement site that dates from about 1500 BC to 300 AD spanning the Iron Age and early historic periods of South Indian archeology. Her earlier work in the region focused on a medieval city that was occupied from about 1350 to 1565 AD, the capital of a large empire that ruled all of South India during that period. The city was one of the largest cities in the world in the year 1500, Sinopoli said.

Read the full article at Advance at UNM