Marieka Arksey

I am a fourth year Ph.D. student in the World Cultures Interdisciplinary Ph.D. program at the University of California, Merced. I attended the University of Toronto in Canada and earned my B.S. in Archaeological Science. After graduating, I worked at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto as an Assistant Technician for the Mesoamerican collection. I then completed my M.A. in Manchester, England in Arts, Histories and Cultures and spent two years working at the British Museum in London as a Digitization Fellow for the Department of the Middle East’s Ashurbanipal Project. Over the past 7 years I have worked on two sites in South Africa and over 15 Maya sites in Belize, mostly cave sites. I study Maya cave archaeology at UC Merced with a specific focus on the use of the exteriors of caves as public performance spaces during the Maya collapse.