Nathan Klembara, PhD
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Teaching Assistant Professor SASW, 204 Waters Hall |
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Nathan Klembara is a broadly trained, four-field anthropologist with an emphasis in archaeological anthropology. He received his undergraduate degree in Anthropology/Archaeology from Mercyhurst University (2014) and his Ph.D in Anthropology from Binghamton University (2025), in which he focused on Upper Paleolithic archaeology, the archaeology of identity, and the anthropology of knowledge production. Throughout all his many academic side quests, Dr. Klembara has developed research interests in several areas. His primary archaeological research involves death and funerary rituals of the Middle Paleolithic, Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic of Western Europe. Specifically, his research looks into the origins of human burial in the evolutionary record and how early humans negotiated, contested, invented, and constructed their individual and communal identities through funerary and mortuary practices. Death is a phenomenological process that affectively influences the mourners who attend the funeral. Dr. Klembara is interested in the materiality of death in early human prehistory, as well as the ways in which past humans utilized and manipulated landscapes through this identity construction. Dr. Klembara examines these topics through both evolutionary and critical social theory lenses in order to fully understand the biological and social processes of death. In this work, Dr. Klembara has excavated in the UK, Spain, France, and Italy, including at Atapuerca and his current research at Peyre Blanque, an 18,000 year old site in southern France. He has also worked extensively throughout the United States in New Mexico, South Carolina, and throughout the Great Lakes region. Dr. Klembara's interest in early prehistory also encouraged his fascination for lithic (stone tool) materials from the archaeological record. In many early sites the stone materials are all that have preserved, and so archaeologists must make broad interpretations about past societies from limited evidence. Dr. Klembara is interested in what stone tool materials can tell us beyond subsistence and economy, and instead what they can also elucidate about social identity, religion/cosmology, and "higher order" questions of how people experience the social worlds of the Paleolithic and Mesolithic. While thinking about how people constructed and expressed their identities in the past, Dr. Klembara also became interested in how archaeologists are also enmeshed in historically specific social worlds. Archaeologists, and scientists more broadly, are not separate from the societies in which they have been enculturated. When not excavating himself, Dr. Klembara conducts ethnography of archaeological investigations to get a better understanding of how archaeologists themselves are a sub-culture with their own socially constructed organization and rules, all of which influence the interpretation of archaeological data. Through ethnographic field research, interviews, and linguistic analysis, Dr. Klembara's research examines how/why archaeology is influenced by the social, political, and historical circumstances around us. At K-State, Dr. Klembara teaches Introduction to Archaeology, Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology, Human Evolution, the Archaeology of Death and Burial, Archaeological Field/Lab Methods, North American Archaeology, European Archaeology, Archaeological Myths and Mysteries, and more. |
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