Dr. Mark T. Lycett is an archaeologist and environmental/ecological historian. Previously he worked at the University of Chicago, where he was the Director of the Program on the Global Environment from 2007-2016, and Academic Director of Chicago's South Asian Civilization Quarter Abroad Program in Pune, India from 2002 to 2016. He has also served as the Director of the Center for International Studies at the University of Chicago. Mark's research and teaching engagements with South Asia have included the Vijayanagara Metropolitan Survey (1988-1997) and work on landscape ecology, biodiversity, conservation, and the social lives of forests and forest products. He currently co-directs two multi-year research projects with Kathleen Morrison on Biodiversity as a Social Process and a Computational Network Analysis of South Indian Inscriptional Data.
Office Location:
801 Williams Hall (823 Williams Hall for mail)
LAB: 415 Museum
Email:
Phone:
215.746.8898
Website:
Research Interests:
My current research interests focus on the historical anthropology and social ecology of landscape formation, biodiversity, and power relations in South Asia. I am interested in the interplay of cultural landscapes and forest history; in the relationship between commemoration, social memory; and in the cultural construction of place in southern India. I have also written extensively on the social history and historical ecology of place and landscape in the Spanish Colonial Americas.
Selected Publications:
2016 (K.D. Morrison, M. Lycett, and M. Trivedi) Megaliths and Memory: Kadebakele and the Megaliths of Northern Karnataka, in Proceedings of the 20th Conference of the "European Association for South Asian Archaeology and Art". Vol. 2: Contextualizing Material Culture in South and Central Asia in Pre- Modern Times, edited by V. Widorn, U. Franke, and P. Latschenberger pp. 239-252. Brepols, Turnhout.
2014 (K.D. Morrison and M.T. Lycett) Constructing Nature: Socionatural Histories of an Indian Forest, in The Social Lives of Forests: The Past, Present, and Future of Woodland Resurgence, ed. S.B. Hecht, K.D. Morrison, and C. Padoch, pp. 148-160. University of Chicago Press.
2014 (M.T. Lycett) Towards An Historical Ecology Of The Mission In Seventeenth Century New Mexico. In Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missions New Perspectives from Archaeology and Ethnohistory, edited by Tsim Schneider and Lee Panich, pp. 172-187. University of Arizona Press, Tucson.
2013 (M.T. Lycett and K.D. Morrison) The "Fall" of Vijayanagara Reconsidered: Political Destruction and Historical Construction in South Indian History. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient. 56: 433–470.
2013 (K.D. Morrison and M.T. Lycett) Forest Products in a Wider World: Early Historic Connections in Southern India, in Connections and Complexity: Papers in Honor of Gregory Possehl, ed. S. Abraham, T, Raczek, and U. Rizvi, pp. 127- 142. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, CA.