Heather Nan Lechtman

Professor Heather Nan Lechtman is a Professor of Archaeology and Ancient Technology at Masssachusetts Institute of Technology. In addition, she has served as Director of the Center for Materials Research in Archaeology and Ethnology (CMRAE). She is an archaeologist who studies the technology and material culture of past societies from the perspective of materials science and materials engineering. She held positions at the Sloan Kettering Institute for Cancer Research (1956-1960), the American Institute of Physics (1960-1962) and the Brookhaven National Laboratory (1963-1964), before becoming a research associate in archaeology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1967-1971).  In 1974, Lechtman became a professor at MIT and holds a joint appointment in materials science and engineering.  She has also been the director of the Center for Materials Research in Archaeology and Ethnology since 1977.Heather Lechtman carries out her fieldwork in the Andean zone of South America where she has spent 38 years investigating the prehistoric systems of technology Andean peoples developed to manage a highly varied and high stress environment. Her field of specialty is prehistoric Andean metallurgy. Professor Lechtman's research has demonstrated that the Andean region was one of the primary zones for the development of sophisticated metallurgical practice anywhere in the ancient world, a true "heartland of metallurgy." Her current investigations explore the extractive metallurgical processes that societies of the Central Andes developed as distinct from those practiced by peoples of the South-central Andean region.