Phyllis Johnson
- (She/her/hers)
- john9097@msu.edu
- 615-587-0717
- McDonel E-27
- Assistant Professor
- Anthropology
Biography
Dr. Johnson is an anthropological archaeologist with over 20 years of experience on archaeological projects in the Midwest, Southeast, and Great Plains regions of the United States, along with Guatemala. Johnson completed her B.A. from Wright State University in 2007 and her M.A. from the University of Tennessee in 2009. She worked full-time as a project manager and principal investigator in cultural resource management from 2011-2016, and she later graduated from Vanderbilt University in 2021 with a Ph.D. in Anthropology. Dr. Johnson completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Kentucky in 2023 wherein she focused on the application of machine learning to analyses of archaeological soil samples. Following her postdoc, she served as the Director of the Augustana University Archaeology Lab from 2023-2025 before joining MSU.
Dr. Johnson is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at MSU and is also the Director of the Cultural Resources Lab (CuRL), providing training in CRM and archaeological methods for undergraduate and graduate students at MSU. Dr. Johnson is also a Core Faculty member for the Center for Gender in Global Context (GenCen) and an affiliated faculty member in the Environmental Science and Policy program (ESPP). Her areas of expertise include cultural resource management (CRM), household archaeology, computational archaeology, social inequality, stone tool analysis, gender, and archaeological ethics. Her current research examines intra- and intersite stone tool production and utilization practices at Fort Ancient sites in Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana.
2025 news story about the plans for the CuRL Lab: https://socialscience.msu.edu/news-events/news/2025-09-19.html
Works
Johnson, Phyllis S. and Erica Carmody. In press. Patriarchy Persists: Gender Inequities in Plains Anthropologist Publishing from 1954 to 2023. Plains Anthropologist.
Johnson, Phyllis S. In press. Fostering Collaborative Archaeological Research in the Northern Plains: A Case Study from Lone Tree Farm, Rock County, MN. Michigan Archaeology.
Markus Eberl, Rebecca Estrada Aguila, and Phyllis S Johnson. 2025. Macrodebitage Writ Small? Comparing Micro- and Macrodebitage Using Experimental Knapping and Dynamic Image Analysis. Lithic Technology 50(3): 326-338.
Makayla Williams, Phyllis S. Johnson, and George Shurr. 2024. Bijou Blades from Lone Tree Heritage Farm, Site 21RK82. To the Point: The Newsletter of the South Dakota Archaeological Society.
Johnson, Phyllis S. 2023. Centering and Applying Indigenous Approaches to Decolonization in Cultural Resource Management. Transforming Archaeology 31(2): 137-149.
Eberl, Markus, Phyllis S. Johnson, Rebecca Estrada Aguila, and Michael McBride. 2023. Redefining Lithic Microdebitage with Experimental Archaeology. Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences (15)161.
Eberl, Markus, Phyllis S. Johnson, Amy E. Rieth, Umang Chaudhry, Rebecca Estrada Aguila, Michael McBride. 2023. Machine Learning-Based Identification of Lithic Microdebitage. Advances in Archaeological Practice 11(2): 152-163.
Johnson, Phyllis S., Markus Eberl, Rebecca Estrada Aguila, Charreau Bell, and Jesse Spencer-Smith. 2022. Using Tiny Artifacts to Answer Big Questions: Machine Learning, Microdebitage, and Household Spaces at Tamarindito. North American Archaeologist 43(4): 328-347.
Johnson, Phyllis S. 2022. Examining Gender Disparities in Computational Archaeology. Journal of Computer Applications in Archaeology 5(1): 140-151.
Eberl, Markus, Phyllis S. Johnson, and Rebecca Estrada Aguila. 2022. Studying Lithic Microdebitage with a Dynamic Image Particle Analyzer. North American Archaeologist 43(4): 312-327.
Johnson, Phyllis S., Markus Eberl, Michael McBride, and Rebecca Estrada Aguila. 2021. Dynamic Image Analysis as a Method for Discerning Microdebitage from Soil Samples. Lithic Technology 46(2):111-118.
Johnson, Phyllis S., James C. Pritchard, and Eric C. Poplin. 2016. In Much Smaller Things Forgotten: a Case for Microartifact Analysis in CRM. Southeastern Archaeology 35(1):1-13.
Gallery
Videos
SPARTANS WILL | © Michigan State University