Jeanne Arnold is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She completed undergraduate training in anthropology at the University of Michigan and received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has researched and published extensively on the later prehistory and early Historic period of the American Pacific Coast, focusing on Native American community and household organization, specialized labor and occupations, and the emergence of hierarchical socioeconomic and political relationships in traditional societies. Arnold’s archeological field and laboratory research in western North America has been supported principally by the National Science Foundation. Analyses of Native Californian communities on the Santa Barbara Channel Islands and First Nations villages in the Fraser River Valley of British Columbia have provided a window onto daily household life, specialized craft production, communication and exchange relationships, and subsistence.

Arnold served for more than a decade on the Society for American Archaeology’s National Historic Landmarks Committee, contributing to preserving the nation’s cultural heritage in association with the National Park Service, for which she has received a commendation from the U.S. Department of the Interior. Her recent published work includes investigations into the relationship between political power and labor rights in traditional societies, explorations of the costs and benefits of participation in hierarchies, and the relationship between sophisticated watercraft and political complexity in coastal Pacific Coast societies. Arnold has published five books, most recently Foundations of Chumash Complexity in 2004.