Alejandra Roche Recinos
Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Anthropology Department
Division of History and Social Sciences
Roche Recinos’s research and fieldwork centers on the reconstruction of Maya economic systems and practices, through the analysis of how stone artifacts are produced and exchanged. By better understanding how specialized production and networks of exchange functioned in the Maya world, her work addresses broad questions of regional economic integration, political economy, and the respective roles of nonelite and elite craftspeople. She received her Ph.D in anthropology from Brown University (2021), where she wrote her dissertation on economic exchange within the regional polity of Piedras Negras, located on the border between Mexico and Guatemala. She has conducted fieldwork at many sites throughout Guatemala, and since 2018 she has been working in Mexico as part of the Proyecto Arqueológico Budsiljá-Chocoljá where she also serves as project lithic analyst. She is also currently developing a new field project with researchers from Japan, Guatemala, and Mexico in the Pacific South Coast of Guatemala. This project seeks to understand the relationship between the powerful city of Teotihuacan in Central Mexico and the small centers located along the coast in Guatemala, especially the site of Río Seco.