Deborah M. Pearsall
Dr. Deborah Pearsall is an American archaeologist, specializing in paleoethnobotany. She is a professor emerita in the Department of Anthropology, University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri, where she first began working in 1978.
Retired from MU in 2013 after 35 years, Deborah Pearsall holds a BA from the University of Michigan and MA and PhD from the University of Illinois, all degrees in Anthropology. Her interests within this discipline center on South American archaeology and paleoethnobotany--the study of people-plant interrelationships through the archaeological record. She has conducted paleoethnobotanical research in numerous locations in the Americas. Her research has two broad themes: the origins and spread of agriculture in the lowland Neotropics, and methods and approaches in paleoethnobotany. She is the author of three books, Paleoethnobotany. A Handbook of Procedures; Plants and People in Ancient Ecuador: The Ethnobotany of the Jama River Valley; and D. R. Piperno and D. M. Pearsall, The Origins of Agriculture in the Lowland Neotropics, and was the general editor of Academic Press’s 2008 edition of the Encyclopedia of Archaeology.
Pearsall has published in numerous professional journals and edited books. She has been honored for lifetime achievements by the Society for American Archaeology, the Society of Ethnobiology, and the Archaeological Institute of America.