Dr. Sikes has a background in cultural resource management, historical archaeology, colonial history, and maritime archaeology. Her research uses primary documents alongside alternative sources of evidence (including artifact assemblages, historic landscapes and buildings, watercraft, pictorial maps, photographs, and oral histories) in order to reveal the experiences of people who are underrepresented in the documentary record. Archaeological landscapes and material culture are her points of entry into historical relationships among people united or divided by ethnicity, race, language, religion, and/or class. Her past surveys and excavations have examined 17th-century multicultural settlements and sites of 18th-century urban enslavement in colonial Virginia, 19th-century Irish responses to British administration of coastal waters in Ireland, and 19th-century transitions from enslavement to emancipation by African American families and communities.

Work in Progress
The Servant and the Wolf-Hunter: Labor and Invisibility in the Early Virginia Colony. Book manuscript in preparation.

Selected Publications
2024 Elizabethan Families Lost and Found? In Search of the Lost Colony, North Carolina Historical Review 101 (3): 336-341.

2017 An Archaeological History of Clover Bottom Plantation (Site 40DV186). Research report prepared for the Tennessee Division of Archaeology and Tennessee Historical Commission. Nashville, TN. (151 pages)

2014 (with Chuck Meide) Manipulating the Maritime Cultural Landscape: Vernacular Boats and Economic Relations in 19th-century Achill Island, Ireland. Journal of Maritime Archaeology 9 (1): 115–141.

2011 (with Chuck Meide)The Achill Yawl: Vernacular Boats in Historical Context on Achill Island, Ireland. International Journal for Nautical Archaeology 40(2):235-255.

2008. Stars as Social Space? Contextualizing 17th-Century Chesapeake Star-Motif Pipes. Post-Medieval Archaeology 42(1):75-103.

Online Public Outreach

“Unearthing Clover Bottom’s Majority: Using Archaeology to Trace One Community’s Path to Freedom.” 30 Days of Tennessee Archaeology, Tennessee Council for Professional Archaeology. September 28, 2015. URL: tennesseearchaeologycouncil.wordpress.com/2015/09/28/30-days-of-tennessee-archaeology-2015-day-28/

Undergraduate Courses Taught
HIST 2010 Survey of United States History I
ANTH/HIST 4860 Historical Archaeology

Graduate Courses Taught
HIST 6510/7510 Seminar in Public History

HIST 6550/7550 Seminar in American Material Culture

HIST 6710/7710 Essentials of Public Archaeology

HIST 7991/7992 Professional Residency Colloquium

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