Tanya A. Faberson, PhD, RPA
Principal Investigator
Historic Materials Specialist
Tanya Faberson holds a doctorate degree in anthropology with an emphasis in historical archaeology. She has more than 11 years field and laboratory experience in the Southeast and has supervised numerous phase I, II, and III archaeological investigations. She has also conducted extensive oral history interviews and archival research for various projects. Tanya's research interests are focused on historical archaeology, historic site preservation and restoration, social inequality and stratification, domination and resistance, political economy, material culture studies, heritage studies, public archaeology, and social theory. Her dissertation, “In the Shadow of Greatness: The Archaeology of Capitalism, Agriculture, and the Informal Economy at Marble Springs, Knox County, Tennessee, 1847-1932,” entailed an examination of the archaeological evidence of social inequality and the political and economic milieu of the nineteenth and early twentieth century southeastern United States. Her master’s thesis examined the archaeological evidence of resistance to public health reform legislation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
In her spare time, Tanya enjoys knitting, reading, sewing, hiking, and spending time with her partner and their daughters. They also have three dogs, a cat, two parakeets, and a hamster. Tanya was born in Melbourne, Australia, but grew up in Germany and southern Illinois. She has also resided in Texas, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Kentucky.