Speaker > Biography

Carmel Schrire

Professor
Department of Anthropology
Rutgers University

Carmel Schrire was born in Cape Town, South Africa, and educated at the University of Cape Town, Cambridge University and the Australian National University. She started off as a prehistoric archaeologist, doing doctoral research in the Northern Territory, Australia, on the way in which modern Aboriginal behaviour can help interpret prehistoric remains. In 1984 she initiated a major program in the historical archaeology of European contact and settlement at the Cape. In 2004, she excavated the house of the "Last Jew of Auschwitz" in the little town of Oswiecim, Poland. Her research has been published in papers and books. "Digging through Darkness. Chonicles of an Archaeologist" appeared in 1995 and focusses heavily on archaeology at the Cape, South Africa. It was awarded the 1996 Book Prize by the Society for American Archaeology.

Carmel lives mainly in Princeton NJ where she is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Rutgers. The State University of New Jersey. She commutes annually to Cape Town, where she holds honorary appointments as Research Associate in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cape Town, and at IZIKO, the South African Museum. She has two children, neither of whom are archaeologists. Reuben Steiger runs a virtual reality company in California and Nina is head of the Writers Center at the Soho Theatre in London.