Research Affiliate, Museum of Anthropological Archaeology
he / him
About
Research interests: anthropology of death; politics of death, change, and social transformation; cultural heritage management; remote sensing; digital archaeology; Bronze Age Europe; Precolonial continental US
Polányi is an anthropological archaeologist with experience in archaeological research and cultural resources management. He is specialized in mortuary practice and social change in central European Bronze Age. He founded Sandbox Archaeology in 2020 to create an innovation sandbox aimed at developing novel approaches and technologically enhanced procedures in cultural heritage management for more effective detection, protection, and preservation of the past. Currently he is working on multiple federally funded projects with the Arizona Army National Guard and the University of Indianapolis deploying state-of-the-art remote sensing technologies including sUAS-based geophysical, LiDAR, and optical survey systems.
As a research affiliate at UMMAA, he is involved in Prof. Saltini Semerari’s project on prehistoric population dynamics, mobility, and interactions across the Adriatic Sea. His work includes designing and executing large-scale geophysical and multi-sensor optical surveys to locate materialities of life and death in Bronze Age and Iron Age SE-Italy and Albania. Additionally, as a research affiliate at UC Davis, he works on an ethnoarchaeological project—funded by the Templeton Foundation (PIs: Prof. Cristina Moya)—examining the adoption of new religious and ritual behaviors in the Peruvian Altiplano. As a Visiting Scholar at Northwestern University, he is involved in the Colonial Tarangambadi Archaeological Survey (PI: Prof. Mark Hauser) set out to study the intersection of class and environmental vulnerability in SE-India.
Affiliations
Museum of Anthropological Archaeology, University of Michigan
Department of Anthropology, Northwestern University
Department of Anthropology, University of California, Davis
Highlighted publications
2024 Circuits of reproduction: The opportunities and power to change. To appear in Beyond heterogeneities: New perspectives on social and cultural diversity from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age in the Carpathian Basin, edited by K. Furholt, M.L.C. Depaermentier, M. Kempf, and M. Furholt. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13356433
2023 Integrated remote sensing approaches for large-scale assessment of cultural heritage. A case study from central Arizona (with S.A. Manney). To appear in Proceedings of the 50th Conference on Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8310600
2022 The rise of idiôtês: Micro-politics of death and community reproduction in Bronze Age Hungary. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 68:101445. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2022.101445
