Elizabeth Sawchuk

Dr. Sawchuk is a bioarchaeologist and anthropological archaeologist who studies the biological and social impacts of the spread of food production across sub-Saharan Africa. She conducts research in Kenya, Tanzania, and Zambia to understand the different ways in which people adopted herding and farming, and the environmental and cultural contexts of these transitions. Her work combines diverse evidence from human remains, ancient DNA, mortuary contexts, material culture, and ethnographic records to understand how people cope with periods of major change and what lessons we can learn from the past.

She is the Assistant Curator of Human Evolution and the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. She is also a Research Assistant Professor with Stony Brook University in New York, a Research Associate with the Turkana Basin Institute in Kenya, and an Adjunct Professor with the University of Alberta in Canada.