Katharine Lukach, M.A.
Assistant Lab Manager, Veterans Curation Program
Email | areid@txstate.edu
Katharine Lukach is an archaeologist and Assistant Lab Manager for the Veterans Curation Program at the Center for Archaeological Studies at Texas State University. Her work focuses on archaeological collections management, the rehabilitation of legacy collections, and the professional training of student veterans in curation practices.
Her archaeological fieldwork and laboratory research have been conducted in Guatemala, the Yucatán Peninsula, Belize, and Texas. Katharine’s research examines long-distance exchange networks and the social and political dimensions of ceramic production and consumption, particularly during periods of political integration and fragmentation. She specializes in ceramic analysis and petrography, with broader interests in economic systems, community networks, and identity.
She has published in excavation reports, peer-reviewed journals such as Ancient Mesoamerica and Latin American Antiquity, and edited volumes on topics including Maya figurines, the reprovenancing and repatriation of looted artifacts, and Maya dress and ornamentation. Her work is also forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of the Maya on interactions between the Southern Maya Region and Mexico, and in Bloomsbury’s Cultural History of Technology on the history and technology of writing systems. She has taught and mentored undergraduate and graduate students in archaeological methods, analysis, and field practice.
She traces her earliest archaeological influences to an overconsumption of PBS’s NOVA and David Macaulay’s Motel of the Mysteries.