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*Charles Riggs is currently on sabbatical until January of 2024.
Charles Riggs is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at Fort Lewis College. He joined the college in 2002. Riggs’s research focuses on Neolithic societies, the spatial organization and architecture of communities, migration and mobility, and computer applications in archaeology, focusing particularly on North America, the American Southwest, and the Near East. He has directed site excavations and archaeological surveys at numerous sites, most recently in the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. Prior to joining the faculty at Fort Lewis College, Riggs was a faculty mentor and assistant director for the University of Arizona Archaeological Field School at Pinedale and a project director and mapping department director at Statistical Research, Inc., where he surveyed development sites for cultural deposits and conducted data recovery. Riggs has received numerous grants from the Colorado State Historical Fund to conduct research and teaching. He was selected by students as an Outstanding Faculty Member in 2007. He served as department chair for the Department of Anthropology from 2010 to 2015 and the coordinator for the Cultural Resource Management Certificate Program from 2006 to 2012. He established the Department of Anthropology’s Earl H. Morris Scholarship in 2010. Riggs is a member of the Society for American Archaeology, the American Anthropological Association, and the Register of Professional Archaeologists. He has served as a manuscript reviewer for numerous publishers and journals, including Oxford University Press, University of Arizona Press, University of Utah Press, Wiley Press, American Antiquity, Journal of Anthropological Research, and Kiva.
Professor of Anthropology Chuck Riggs and students in the FLC Archaeological Field School are featured in "The Ancestors," episode 1 of the second season of the PBS series America from the Ground Up. [6/20/18]
Dr. Riggs was invited to serve on the Society for American Archaeology's Native American Scholarship Committee, which quickly followed behind being asked to serve a second term on the Society's Committee on Native American Relations. Dr. Riggs wrote a piece for the online magazine Sapiens in 2017: "Confronting Cultural Imperialism in Native American Archaeology."
Dr. Charles Riggs and Dr. Kathleen Fine-Dare were invited to participate in the National Science Foundation's (NSF), "Learning NAGPRA: Resources for Teaching and Training" project based at Indiana University and part of a broader NSF initiative on "Cultivating Cultures for Ethical STEM."
“Hearths, ‘Kivas,’ and Households at the Pigg Site: An Architectural Strong Analytical Case from Southwest Colorado,” Colorado Archaeological Society Conference, Durango, CO, 2015 “The Southwestern Region of North America,” The Cambridge World Prehistory, 2014 “A Grasshopper Architectural Perspective on Kinishba,” Kinishba Lost and Found: James B. Shaeffer’s Mid-Century Excavations and Contemporary Complements and Commentaries, 2013 “Late Ancestral Pueblo or Mogollon Pueblo? An Architectural Perspective on Identity,” Kiva, 2010 “NAGPRA’s Effects on Anthropology Education: Views from a College Serving Native American Communities,” co-authored with Kathleen Fine-Dare, Mona Charles, and Dawn Mulhern, Anthropology News, 2010