Victor Salazar Chávez

Background

Program: Anthropology Ph.D. 

Year of Entry: Fall 2014.

Advisor: Dr. Jeffrey Blomster

Current Research

Víctor E. Salazar Chávez is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at The George Washington University. He has worked on multiple cultural regions within Mexico, including northwestern Mexico and northern, central, and southern Mesoamerica. Since 2013, his research has focused on the archaeology of Oaxaca. From 2015 to 2017, he co-directed the ‘Formative Etlatongo Project’, along his advisor, Jeffrey P. Blomster, where they discovered the earliest examples of ballcourts from the Mesoamerican Highlands (Blomster and Salazar Chávez 2020). Víctor specializes in the study of past and present foodways, having taught food study courses at The George Washington University. His current research examines the ways in which food is historically contextualized with the constitution of early complex social organization in ancient Oaxaca.

Education

2018 Master of Arts, The George Washington University

2013 Licenciatura en Arqueología, Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potosí

Publications

Salazar Chávez, V., J. Blomster, and J. Gutierrez Ramirez. Entre conchas y juegos de pelota: diferenciaciones sociales, interacciones interregionales y producción de ornamentos en el Formativo Temprano de Etlatongo, Oaxaca. In Avances y perspectivas en la investigación de los materiales arqueológicos de concha, homenaje Dra. Lourdes Suárez Diez, edited by A. Velázquez, and M.L. Gallardo (Submitted for publication with the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, México, CDMX, October 2021).

Salazar Chávez, V. and J. Blomster. The Cooked, the Burned, and the Modified: Early Formative Cuisines and Human-Animal Relations in the Mixteca Alta. In “Mesquite Pods to Mezcal: 4,000 Years of Oaxacan Cuisines”, edited by V. Pérez Rodríguez, S. Morell-Hart, and S. M. King. (Submitted for publication with the University of Texas Press Austin, TX, September 2021).

Blomster, J. and V. Salazar Chávez. 2020. Origins of the Mesoamerican Ballgame: Earliest Ballcourt from the Highlands found at Etlatongo, Oaxaca, Mexico. Science Advances 6:eayy6964.

Joyce, A., S. Barber, J. Brzezinski, C. Lucido, and V. Salazar Chávez. 2016. Negotiating Political Authority and Community in Terminal Formative Coastal Oaxaca. In Political Strategies in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, S. Kurnick and J. Baron (Eds.), pp. 61-96. University Press of Colorado, Boulder.

Distinctions

2022. Dumbarton Oaks – Trustees for Harvard University, Pre-Columbian Summer Fellow

2021. The George Washington University. Dissertation Completion Award

2019. National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award, “Archaeological Investigation of Foodways and Social Organization in the Americas”

2015-16. Lewis N. Cotlow Research Foundation for Archaeology Research