Educated at the University of Pennsylvania and University of Arizona, Patricia L. Crown is an archaeologist who works in the U.S. Southwest.  She has been on the faculty at the University of New Mexico since 1993, where she is the Leslie Spier Distinguished Professor of Anthropology.  She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2014.  Prof. Crown has conducted field investigations in the Ancestral Pueblo, Mogollon, and Hohokam areas of the American Southwest and has worked in Chaco Canyon since 2005.  She is particularly interested in ritual, women’s roles in the past, and how children learned the skills they needed to function as adults.  To get at these issues, she studies ceramics.  With collaborator Jeffrey Hurst, she identified the first prehispanic cacao (chocolate) north of the Mexican border in ceramics from Chaco Canyon using organic residue analysis.  She directed the re-excavation of a room in Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon in 2013, and the results of that study were published in 2020 by UNM Press as a volume, The House of the Cylinder Jars: Room 28 at Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon.