David Macias has almost 12 years of professional experience as a professional archaeologist. He has completed projects in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Colorado, and Arizona, and has additionally volunteered in South Carolina and Belize. His academic interests focus on the art and symbolism of Mesoamerica and the Southeast, and in the practice of chipped stone crafting.
In 2006, he completed a bachelor’s degree in Sociology with minors in History, Anthropology, and Creative Writing at Winthrop University. In his junior year of college, he took his first Anthropology class with Dr. Richard Chacon, whose fascination with people and their cultures was infectious. Then in 2005, David completed an archaeological field school, hosted by the UNC-Chapel Hill and carried out near Winthrop. During this training, he found a bit of fired clay that showed the finger, and palm prints of a Catawba ceramicist who had lived 200 years prior. This moment secured his future in professional archaeology.
Between 2008 and 2010, He attended the University of South Carolina (USC) and completed a second bachelor’s degree, this time in Anthropology with an emphasis in archaeology. At USC, David completed an honors thesis under the advisement of Adam King. The research focused on horned/feathered serpent iconography throughout North America. The following fall, David moved to Texas to begin his master’s degree at Texas State University.
At Texas State, David worked with Dr. F. Kent Reilly and Dr. Robert L. Williams in the study of native pictographic writing systems of the Southeast and Mesoamerica. For his thesis, David completed an iconographic typology for day signs in the sacred calendar of the Mixtec people in Oaxaca, Mexico. This task required that he already knew how to read their pictographic writing, which he learned from Dr. Williams. David completed his Master of Arts in Anthropology in December 2013.
During his time in graduate school, he witnessed brainstorming sessions between his mentors. The sessions at the Mississippian Iconographic Workshops, which Dr. Reilly hosted at Texas State, put David and many other students in the same room as scholars like James A. Brown, David Dye, and, of course, Adam King. Being Kent Reilly’s student meant keeping an open dialogue between scholars and the descendent populations of indigenous peoples we study. Because of these experiences, David proudly has friends among the Florida Creek, Osage, and Chickasaw.
His professional archaeology career began in 2014 when he joined the Spring Lake Data Recovery project with the Center for Archaeological Studies at Texas State. Then in 2015 he joined ARC as a field technician and was trained in Phase I survey during the Riverby Ranch project and stayed on for the Lower Bois d’Arc Creek Reservoir Phase II. Over the next few years, he found projects among a variety of companies and worked all over Texas and neighboring states. Then in 2018, Allen Rutherford recruited David to come back for the Bois d’Arc Lake Project.
Since returning to ARC, his role as progressed from field technician to crew chief, project archaeologist, and now finally Principle Investigator. Following the BDL Phase III, he has learned to perform and teach chipped stone analysis. A far cry from his roots in Iconography, David enjoys the puzzle of studying the crafting procedures that create chipped stone tools and debris. He looks forward to using his ongoing studies in contributing to ARC’s public outreach opportunities.
Contact David Macias via email at: david@arc-digs.com