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Biography
Franco D. Rossi is an archaeologist interested in the ways materials and cultures shape each other. He received his PhD in archaeology from Boston University and currently teaches at MIT about materials-based approaches to anthropological questions, with a focus on ancient technologies and sustainable city-building from an archaeological perspective. Rossi’s new project, exploring limestone as a sustainable building material, looks back to some of humankind’s oldest dwellings from Paleolithic southern Italy and provides a framework for thinking ahead toward their implications for surviving a planetary future.
Rossi got his start working on collaborative archaeology projects in the Maya Biosphere of Guatemala, where he has served for many years as archaeologist, epigrapher, and co-director of Digital Humanities for Proyecto Regional Arqueologico San Bartolo-Xultun (PRASBX). In addition to his current collaborative work with the MIT Center for Materials Research in Archaeology and Ethnology (CMRAE), his current research also explores overlooked histories of archaeology and their role in larger histories of science.