For some, the Ice Age is best understood through the 2002 animated film with a woolly mammoth, ground sloth, and smilodon. For Dr. Madeline Mackie, new assistant professor of anthropology, it’s a bit different.
Mackie, originally from Southern California, knew from a young age that she wanted to be an anthropologist.
During her undergraduate years at the University of California, Davis, Mackie fell in love with the archaeology of foragers—individuals who do not source their food from cultivated crops or domesticated animals.
“This led me to do archaeology on Indigenous communities in North America and understand the communities that call this place home,” she said. “I really wanted to understand what human life in the past was like in the place I currently live.”
After completing her undergraduate degree, Mackie’s interests took her to the University of Wyoming, where she earned her master’s and Ph.D. She then spent time as a postdoctoral researcher, focusing on some of the earliest communities in North America at the end of the last Ice Age.
Mackie continues this research today. She is particularly interested in how these communities interacted with their environment, especially with megafauna (e.g., mammoths, mastodons, and giant ground sloths). For the past several years, Mackie has been working on mammoth kill or butchery sites, where ancient communities hunted or scavenged meat from these multi-ton animals.
Through her research, Mackie works to understand the impact of what people ate 12,000 years ago and how that impacted their way of life.
“I’m looking at the interactions that people had with animals that are now extinct,” she said. “It’s such an interesting idea to talk about people hunting really large game.”
Since arriving in East Lansing, Mackie has enjoyed working with the department and values its emphasis on collaboration.
“I think the best archaeology is collaborative and comes from working with different people from different places and backgrounds,” she said. “That is really valued here.”
Mackie has enjoyed teaching because it allows her to share her passion for archaeology, not just with students who are pursuing the field, but also with those who want to explore the topic. She is looking forward to giving students the foundational skills and training they need to understand how to reconstruct the past.
“I love teaching people about why the past is important and why we should talk about it,” she said. “What happened in the past affects what is going on in the present, and it’s really important for people to value that—even if they’re not interested in becoming an archaeologist.”
In her free time, Mackie enjoys knitting, cross-stitching, and baking sourdough bread.