Dumbarton Oaks Humanities Fellow, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
Idabelle Paterson graduated from Harvard College in May 2022 with a joint degree in anthropology (archaeology track) and human evolutionary biology. Her undergraduate studies encompassed a wide variety of topics and skills, including Amazonian archaeology, lithic studies, sleep studies, climate change, film, landscape studies, Portuguese, osteoarchaeology, GIS, and Indigenous studies. She has conducted fieldwork in the Brazilian Amazon, along the northern coast of Peru, and domestically in New Hampshire and Wyoming. Paterson was awarded the 2022 Kenneth Maxwell Thesis Prize in Brazilian Studies from the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University for her senior thesis, "Ex Uno Plures: A Regional Examination of Geoglyph Site Patterning in the Southwestern Amazon," for which she created a novel classification system and improved database of earthworks sites. She has pursued social science research through the human evolutionary biology department as a research assistant, studying the differences in political preferences between cultures as well as written language usage in autistic individuals, and has museum experience at Strawbery Banke, NH and the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East.