Joel W. Palka (B.A., Northern Illinois University, 1987; Ph.D., Vanderbilt University, 1995) is assistant professor of anthropology and Latin American studies at the University of Illinois–Chicago, where he has taught since 1996. He was a visiting assistant professor at Vanderbilt University from 1995–96, where he taught courses in Mesoamerican art and archaeology. He is also adjunct curator in anthropology at The Field Museum in Chicago, where he studies collections of material culture from Mesoamerica. His research specialties and interests include cultural evolution, social organization, social inequality, settlement patterns, Mesoamerican ethnohistory, Maya history and archaeology, and Maya hieroglyphic writing. He is also a member of the Society of American Archaeology, the American Anthropological Association, and the Chicago Maya Society.
Dr. Palka has undertaken archaeological investigations in Classic Maya ruins in Honduras and Guatemala and has lived and traveled extensively throughout Mexico and Central America. He has directed excavations in the northern rainforests of Guatemala as a Fulbright Scholar and Vanderbilt University Mellon Grant recipient, and he currently is the director of a historical and archaeological project sponsored by the University of Illinois–Chicago, Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Sigma Xi: The Scientific Research Society, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Geographic Society that examines indigenous culture change of the 19th-century Lacandon Maya of lowland Chiapas and Guatemala. Dr. Palka has written numerous articles in English and Spanish regarding his work on Classic Maya civilization and the 19th-century Lacandon. His dissertation Classic Maya Social Inequality and the Collapse at Dos Pilas, Peten, Guatemala is being prepared for publication by Vanderbilt University Press. He has also reviewed books and articles for Latin American Antiquity, Visual Anthropology, Ancient Mesoamerica, and Ethnohistory.