Shayla Monroe received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), in 2021. She specializes in faunal analysis, the social zooarchaeology of Sudan and Egypt, the archaeology of African pastoralism. Her dissertation analyzes the acquisition of cattle at the ancient Egyptian colonial fortress of Askut (c. 1850 – 1550 BC) and its implications for culture contact and asymmetrical power relations between pastoralists and non-pastoralists. Monroe earned her M.A. in Anthropology from UCSB in 2015. Since 2013, she has worked as an archaeologist at the 3rd Cataract of the Nile River in Sudan, first at the Egyptian colonial site at Tombos, and then at the Kerma hinterlands site, Abu Fatima, also in northern Sudan. Monroe began her career at Howard University, where she earned degrees in Anthropology and English (2012). She also spent two seasons (2010 and 2011) working at L’Hermitage plantation (also known as the Best Farm Slave Village) with the National Park Service in Frederick, Maryland. Dr. Monroe's present research focuses on mapping social networks, environmental stress, and intergroup relationships in the ancient Nile Valley and the Sahara. Her current Harvard courses include:         Zooarchaeology         Comparative Human Ecologies         Archaeology of the African Holocene         Contemporary Issues in Archaeology