Archaeologist, Ethnohistorian, Educator
Duncan is a semi-retired archaeologist and educator living in Middlebury, Vermont with his wife and family. He was first introduced to Native American Archaeology and Ethnography in a newly formed Northern Studies program at Dartmouth College back in 1956 during his undergraduate BA studies of Inuit, Dorset and Athabaskan cultures in Canada with Elmer Harp, Robert McKennan and the Arctic explorer and ethnologist, Vilhjalmur Stefannson. This led Duncan to a summer internship in the Arctic at the weather station at Alert on the northern tip of Ellsmere Island where he had a brief encounter with a polar bear he never wants to repeat!
Four years of graduate work afterwards in African and European Prehistory at the University of Edinburgh and the Institute of Archaeology at the University of London in the U.K. resulted in an ABD in Environmental Archaeology which led Duncan in 1964 to nine years of “dirt archaeology” involving prehistoric and historic surveys and excavations in West Africa and the Caribbean.
Back in the U.S. during the mid-1970’s, Duncan studied under William Sears at Florida Atlantic University focusing on Indian cultures in the Southeast including the Calusa, Tequesta and Seminole peoples of South Florida as part of his MA in Anthropology. After some years doing maritime projects involving historic shipwrecks with his non-profit CRM consulting firm, Duncan earned a Ph.D. in Environmental Science Education at The Union Institute & University where he taught undergraduate and graduate students in Anthropology and Archaeology for ten years.
Now when he’s not teaching at the Community College of Vermont and Middlebury College, Duncan is writing books on Native American Wabanaki culture and history in northern New England for students and the general public including an up-dated regional archaeological synthesis of Western Abenaki people across Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine and over the Canadian border into southern Québec under contract for publication with the University Press of New England.
