Richard W. Yerkes, Ph.D.
Dr. Richard Yerkes received his B.A. from Beloit College, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He began his archaeological fieldwork in 1972 at Cahokia—the large Mississippian temple town near Collinsville, Illinois—as a student on the Beloit College field school directed by Robert Salzer.
Dr. Yerkes has studied Ice Age hunter-gatherers and later prehistoric foragers and farmers in the Great Lakes, Ohio Valley, and Mississippi Valley. Inspired by Robert L. Hall, Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois-Chicago, he has compared and contrasted the mound-building Hopewell tribes of Ohio with the Mississippian chiefdoms of Illinois.
Dr. Yerkes has also worked on an archaeological survey in Egypt with James Phillips of The Field Museum, and on investigations of ancient rural settlements and sanctuaries in Cyprus and Greece with William Parkinson and Apostolos Sarris. His current research in Hungary with Parkinson and Attila Gyucha includes comparisons of the lifeways of early farmers in southeastern Europe and Midwestern North America. For more information about Prof. Yerkes, please visit his Ohio State Faculty Page.
