Kacey Chandler Grauer

Kacey Grauer is an anthropological archaeologist who studies human-environment relationships using archaeobotanical analysis, household excavations, and landscape analysis. She is the lab manager of Dr. Li Liu’s Archaeological Science Lab. Prior to Stanford, she was a lecturer in the Anthropology Department at Northwestern University, where she earned her PhD in June 2021.

Kacey specializes in the ancient Maya area and has been a senior staff member of the Aventura Archaeology Project (AAP) in northern Belize since 2015. Her research has compared commoner and elite access to water during the height of drought at the city of Aventura, where she found that less restricted access to water allowed people of all economic classes to thrive amidst environmental crisis. Her current and ongoing research addresses differential access to food during drought using phytolith and starch grain analyses. Kacey centers Indigenous ontologies in her research and strives to connect archaeology to present-day environmental justice concerns. In addition to archaeological research, she has co-organized community engagement events with Dr. Cynthia Robin of Northwestern University, AAP staff members, and the National Institute of Culture and History in Belize.

She has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the National Geographic Society, and has recently been published in the Journal of Social Archaeology and the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology. Her publications can be found on her Academia.edu page.