Dr. Carlton Shield Chief Gover (Pawnee Nation) is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Assistant Curator of Archaeology at the University of Kansas, where he also serves as affiliate faculty in the Museum Studies and Indigenous Studies Programs. A citizen of the Pawnee Nation, his scholarship centers on Great Plains archaeology, Indigenous archaeology, and collaborative museum practices. Dr. Shield Chief Gover earned his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Colorado Boulder with certifications in Museology and Native American & Indigenous Studies. His dissertation, The Seeds of Ethnogenesis, explored the formation of Central Great Plains Village societies through Indigenous methodologies and Bayesian chronological modeling.
Carlton Shield Chief Gover
Dr. Shield Chief Gover’s scholarship bridges archaeological science with Indigenous knowledge systems, with research on maize agriculture, horse dispersal, and radiocarbon chronology. He is co-editor of Indigenizing Archaeology (University of Florida Press) and a co-author of the 2023 Science article “Early Dispersal of Domestic Horses into the Great Plains and Northern Rockies,” which earned the AAAS Newcomb Cleveland Prize.
He is a past Board Secretary of the Museum of the Pawnee Nation and currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Plains Anthropological Society as Chair of the Native American Student Award and the Sensitive Image Policy Committee. Nationally, he is the Co-Chair of the Society for American Archaeology’s Committee on Native American Relations. Dr. Shield Chief Gover is also the founder and host of The Great Plains Archaeology Podcast, a platform that elevates archaeological and Indigenous voices across the region.
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