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Photograph of Daniel Sayers

Daniel Sayers Associate Professor CAS | Anthropology

Additional Positions at AU
Graduate Director, Anthropology
Degrees
PhD, Historical Archaeology, College of William & Mary
MA, Anthropology, Western Michigan University
BA, Philosophy and Anthropology, Western Michigan University

Book Currently Reading
Goldfarb, 2023 Crossings: How Road Ecology is Shaping the Future of our Planet
Bio
Dr. Sayers has some 30 years of U.S.-based experience in archaeology and anthropology that he brings to students in the classroom and in his mentoring. He has collaborated with undergraduate and graduate students to help them gain practical know-how in the profession as well as in related areas, such as filmmaking, historiography, Cultural Resources Management, and museum studies. He works to help students understand the ways of anthropological thinking as well as the deep traditions of theory and practice in the profession. Dr. Sayers welcomes working with students with interests in all subdisciplines of anthropology as well as students in other disciplines outside of Anthropology proper.

A Deeper Dive:
Dr. Sayers’s main projects have been his work at several sites associated with 1600-1865 Indigenous American-and-Maroon communities in the Great Dismal Swamp (North Carolina and Virginia), the Delta Trestle Hobo site (1880-1940, Pennsylvania), and the Shepard Farmstead site (1834-1870, Michigan). He has also done substantial research and writing on the Underground Railroad, the homeless and the home, and human-and-animal social dialectics, including most predominantly the systemic and systematic human exploitation and cruelty to non-human beings across the past few centuries.

Sayers’s research, analyses, and contributions to discourses on other issues, like archaeological theory, Maroon scholarship, and professional praxis, have appeared in many academic journals (e.g. International Journal of Historical Archaeology, Historical Archaeology, Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, Western Journal of Black Studies, and Transforming Anthropology, and Reviews in American History) and several edited academic volumes. He is the author of two academic research-based books, A Desolate Place for a Defiant People: The Archaeology of Maroons, Indigenous Americans, and Enslaved Laborers in the Great Dismal Swamp (2014) and The Archaeology of the Homed and the Unhomed (2023), both brought to the bookshelves through the University Press of Florida. Sayers has also received over $280,000 in proposal-based grants for his research across his career.

As an internationally recognized scholar in many areas of considerable interest to the public, Dr. Sayers has appeared in a wide variety of media. These include (TV/Film) PBS, TedEd, Discovery Science Channel, Smithsonian Channel, The Learning Channel, CNN; (Podcasts) 99% Invisible, Constant Wonder; (newspapers) Washington Post Magazine, The Ringer, The Virginian-Pilot, National Post (Canada), and the Associated Press; (Magazines) Smithsonian Magazine; Archaeology Magazine, New Yorker, Nature Conservancy, VegNews, Humanities Magazine; (Radio) NPR, Freedom Now, and the CBC. Dr. Sayers is also deeply committed to engaging local audiences and communities and has appeared in a variety of local, regional and state media (newspapers, radio), YouTube series, and magazines in addition to many local presentations on his research.

As another significant area of his public engagement commitments, Dr. Sayers has worked with many museums, U.S. government agencies, and legal teams. Many people have helped Dr. Sayers to amplify numerous aspects of the lives of people he has studied through his historical archaeological research while he has also helped them as they develop ideas essential to their projects: he has consulted with novelists, non-fiction writers, artists, photographers, progressive business leaders, painters, filmmakers and actors, TV and movie production people, museum specialists, and others in many professions who seek insights on various matters related to the people whose societies he has reconstructed through archaeological and historical research.

Currently, Dr. Sayers is intermittently working on a few streaming series development projects, writing a non-fiction memoir(ish) book, submitting completed short story fiction and non-fiction essays to journals, developing a roadkill-focused research project, and developing an archaeological project that will focus on farming and animal exploitation in the Mid-Atlantic via excavations at one or more farmsteads of the 19th and 20th centuries.
For the Media
To request an interview for a news story, call AU Communications at 202-885-5950 or submit a request. Explore all AU Faculty Experts in our media guide.

Teaching

Spring 2025

  • ANTH-253 Introduction to Archaeology

Fall 2025

  • ANTH-235 The Buried History of the U.S.

  • ANTH-439 Culture, History, Power, Place: Rural/Remote in the U.S.

Partnerships & Affiliations

Scholarly, Creative & Professional Activities

Research Interests

Exploring the following through a political economic perspective indebted to Marx and Sartre:

  • Diasporas and exile
  • Alienation, estrangement, and the material world
  • Labor, class, and commodities
  • Marronage, Maroon communities, and the (so-called) Underground Railroad
  • Farmsteads and rural cultures
  • Defiance and resistance among the oppressed
  • Community power
  • Multispecies power and inequalities (via Critical Animal Studies, Animal Liberation and Rights)
  • Gender, family, and kin, especially in rural contexts
  • Homed and unhomed (a.k.a., homeless, unhoused)
  • Race, racism, and racialization
  • Landscapes, esp. edges, margins, and surreptitious spaces/places

Media Appearances

July 2023

Appeared as a collaborative team member in, “Searching for a Fortress Built by People Who Escaped Slavery”, by Matthew Hutson, The New Yorker

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/searching-for-a-fortress-built-by-people-who-escaped-slavery

May 2023

Participated in the podcast, Tribal Truths, episode, “Nansemond Indian Nation: Looking for Ancestors in the Great Dismal Swamp”, WVTF, Virginia Public Radio.

https://www.wvtf.org/podcast/tribal-truths/2023-05-25/nansemond-indian-nation-looking-for-ancestors-in-the-great-dismal-swamp

August 2022

American Landscapes w/ host Baratunde Thurston, PBS, Episode 4 on the Mid-Atlantic; appeared as archaeology expert and interviewee with host in the Dismal Swamp.

February 2022

The Underground Railroad, episode 3 in 4-part series on Discovery Science Channel; appeared as archaeology expert in Dismal Swamp segment.

Grants and Sponsored Research

NEH "We the People Collaborative Grant; Canon/National Park Service/American Academy of Arts and Sciences Grant        

Films/Documentaries

Escape to the Great Dismal Swamp, Smithsonian Channel, 2018.

Selected Publications

Public Works

Sayers, Dan. 2021, The Secret Society of the Great Dismal Swamp. TedEd short film.

Sayers, Daniel O. 2018, A Modest Firearms Proposal, The Doctor T.J Eckleburg Review.

Sayers, Daniel O., 2017, Guest Columnist, "The Shepard House Has Alot to Teach Us."

Books

*Sayers, Daniel O. (2023). The Archaeology of the Homed and the Unhomed. Archaeology of the American Experience, Michael S. Nassaney and Krysta Ryzewski, series eds., University Press of Florida, Gainesville.

     * 2023 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award (American Library Association)

Sayers, Daniel O. (2014). A Desolate Place for a Defiant People: The Archeology of Maroons, Indigenous Americans, and Enslaved Laborers in the Great Dismal Swamp. University Press of Florida, Gainesville. (Second, paperback edition, 2016).

Some Articles and Book Chapters

Sayers, Daniel O. (2025). Un-Silencing Historical Maroon Societies in the United States. Reviews in American History, Volume 53 (1): 7-32

Sayers, Daniel O. (2023). Some Thoughts on Landscape’s Political-Economic Fissures and Understanding Past Social Radicals. Thematic volume on “Cracks in Capitalism.”, Wurst and Dezsi, eds. International Journal of Historical Archaeology.

Sayers, Daniel O. (2019). The Radical Antebellum Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina and Virginia, USA: Maroons, Indigenous Americans, and the Power of Underdeveloped Landscapes. Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle 58:125-146.

Sayers, Daniel O., and Justin Uehlein (2018). Animal Emancipation and Historical Archaeology: A Pairing Long Overdue. In, Critical Animal Studies: Towards Trans-species Social Justice, Atsuko Matsuoka and John Sorenson, eds., pp.117-142, Rowman & Littlefield International, London, UK.

Short Fiction

Daniel Owen Sayers, 2018, The Omphalos of Pritchard McCovey, Poor Yorick Journal