Jeffrey S. Alvey - North American Archaeologist, Junior Research Associate
Email: jsa3@msstate.edu
Phone: 662-325-0703
Fax: 662-325-8690
Address: PO Box AR, Mississippi State, MS 39762

Curriculum Vitae

B.A., Anthropology, Mississippi State University, 1998
M.A., Applied Anthropology, Mississippi State University, 2003

Jeffrey Alvey received a BA in Anthropology from MSU in 1998 and in December 2003 became the first graduate of the new M.A. program in Applied Anthropology. His thesis was titled, "A Study of Middle Archaic Site Function, Seasonality, and Occupational Intensity in the Uplands of Northeast Mississippi: The Trice Site 22LE827." The goal of his thesis was to clarify the role of smaller upland sites in models of regional settlement organization.

As an undergraduate, Alvey worked as a research assistant for Cobb faculty in various capacities including technical illustration and the application of computer technologies in archaeology. He participated in several projects involving use of the World Wide Web for communicating archaeological resources. Included among these was assistance in developing the Institute’s “Virtual Museum” site. After receiving his undergraduate degree, he participated in the summer of 1999 as a staff member of the Lahav Research Project’s excavations at Tell Halif, in southern Israel.

As a graduate student he held a research assistantship with the Engineering Research Center which engaged him in the study of potential applications of geophysical methods to archaeological site investigations. This included experimentation with the use of an electromagnetic soil conductivity meter and a fluxgate gradiometer as a means to identify sub-surface archaeological features. In the summer of 2002 he served an internship with the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service at the Noxubee Refuge, working in conjunction with the Regional Archaeologist to assist the Refuge in management of its’ cultural resources.

Alvey’s areas of research interest include archaeology of the mid-Holocene southeast, evolutionary archaeology, cultural resources management, settlement patterns, GIS, and the application of geophysical methods in archaeology. As a Junior Research Associate at the Cobb Institute he acts as a director of field surveys and excavations and as a managing consultant for the Institute’s web site and related publication activities. Alvey is also currently serving as a GIS consultant for the Shala Valley Research Project in northern Albania. This project is directed by Dr. Michael Galaty of Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi.

Alvey is active in a number of professional societies including the Southeastern Archaeological Conference, the Mississippi Association of Professional Archaeologists, the Society of American Archaeology, and the Mississippi Archaeological Association, where he currently serves as Northern Executive Committee Member-at-Large and Webmaster for the MAA's website (http://www.msarchaeology.org).