Elizabeth Mancz

Senior Lecturer

I was born in Akron, Ohio and raised in rural Portage County, also in Ohio. I attended the University of Akron, majoring in Combined Classics (that’s both Greek and Latin language, literature and history). I also took all the Anthropology courses I could, but did not do a double major or minor, to avoid taking Sociology courses. This meant that I had to take a number of languages. I read or speak with varying levels of competence, German, French, Latin, Greek (ancient and modern) and Egyptian hieroglyphs. I graduated Magna cum Laude in 1978. During that time, I attended a field school in the Four Corners region run by New Mexico State University. It was a Reserve Phase Pueblo called Coyote Creek.

I had wanted to be an archaeologist since I was 8 years old, so I chose to attend graduate school at the University of Minnesota’s Center for Ancient Studies, an interdisciplinary program that concentrated on archaeology and ancient languages. Students were expected to have at least 2 areas of study; mine were archaeology and zooarchaeology. My area in archaeology was the Eastern Mediterranean, specifically Greece, and my focal time period was the Bronze and Iron Ages. Because we were allowed to design our own program, I took a number of courses in Paleontology and Physical Anthropology at this time. I also dissected a horse with the veterinary students at the Vet School on the Saint Paul Campus.

I wrote 2 Master’s theses: one was on Water Sources in Bronze Age sites in Greece – I think I read every single dig report ever written for Greece at that time, and pored over maps until I dreamed about them! My second thesis was an examination from the point of Zooarchaeology of horses from their earliest evolution to domestication by humans. I also was co-author on a bibliography of materials found in archaeology. I worked for Minnesota’s interlibrary loan department my first year there, and for the next few years worked at the University Bindery, binding books. I spent my summers working in Wyoming doing Contract Archaeology. I also spent a year studying under Dr. Charles Reed, one of the founders of the field of Zooarchaeology and playing with the mammal bone collection at the Field Museum of Chicago at this time.

Before starting my dissertation research, I had the chance to work with Sebastian Payne on the faunal remains from Franchthi, in Greece. This was a transitional Paleolithic/Neolithic site, considered very important in understanding the effect of animal and plant domestication in the development of human culture in Greece. I spent 6 months in Bloomington, Indiana working at Indiana University and the next 6 months in Greece, in Nauplion. It was really great, being so close to a number of major Bronze Age sites, such as Mycenae and Tiryns. I also attended the theater at Epidauros a number of times, seeing Oedipus Rex, Trojan Women, and the Orestes Trilogy among other plays in the original Greek.

I spent 16 months in Greece in total, the last 10 months being in Kalamata, a small industrial city in the western Peloponnesus. I worked on the faunal sample from the site of Nichoria, trying to determine the nature of the Bronze and Iron Age use of animals on the site. Nichoria was a ground-breaking excavation, part of a 10 year study of the region called Messenia. My dissertation, which I originally thought would concentrate on diet, expanded into an analysis of the economic, social and political systems, as I integrated the Linear B records discovered at near by Pylos with the evidence from the bones.

I began teaching Cultural Anthropology part-time at the University of Akron in 1984, originally as a means of supporting myself while I wrote my dissertation, and getting access to a computer that could process my data. At that time we were part of the Sociology Department. There were two full-time faculty and two part-timers.

Because my family is in this area, I have stayed.

In the 19 years since that time, I have done a number of things to supplement my part-time pay. For about 8 years, I worked in and eventually ran the Contract Archaeology program at the University of Akron. We did a number of surveys, which gave students field experience in contract work. A number of our students have worked for professional companies and gone on to graduate school after completing this experience. From 1997 to 2000, I was part owner of a dog training and daycare, which utilized scientific methods of training based on the work of B. F. Skinner. I became interested in behavior, and did a great deal of reading, attended several seminars and worked with two very good behavioralists at that time. I found that dogs were more attentive than humans – probably because dogs are reinforced with liver and humans are reinforced with grades….. But from that point, I became interested in finding ways to teach more positively, as my experience indicated that both animals and humans learn better in a positive atmosphere.

Since Planet Canine was shut down (my business partner got a full-time teaching job and one of my dogs became terminally ill and needed a great deal of care), I have worked at course development for the University of Akron, and taken a part-time job as a Remote Encoder with the US Postal Service. This last job has given me a great deal of insight into the corportate/federal mindset – which is very interesting and more than a little scary at times.

I now teach or have taught Human Evolution, Introduction to Archaeology, & Archaeology of the Americas as well as Cultural Anthropology. I would like to put together and teach other courses in archaeology, in particular a course on the archaeological evidence for the development of pets. Academically, my interests are zooarchaeology and archaeology, although I enjoy teaching Human Evolution and Cultural Anthropology.

For fun, I train dogs, read, play music on the organ, recorder and try to play the harp, sew, knit, garden when my knees allow me to, study the differences between Japanese and American graphic works and animation, which means that I also am learning Japanese, write, draw and play with my computer. I have three Collies, Rhindon, Finn and Bel and a cat who answers to “Ittet” when she feels like it.