Robin Beck is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, where he is also an affiliate faculty in the School of International and Comparative Studies and a Research Associate at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History.  He holds a B.A. from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (1991), an M.A. from the University of Alabama (1997), and a Ph.D. from Northwestern University (2004).

Rob teaches courses at Oklahoma on such topics as the archaeology of Native North American settlements and societies, the archaeological study of death and burial, the archaeology of complex societies, and the archaeology of iconography and style.  His archaeological research includes the development of complex societies in eastern North America and the Andes Mountains of Bolivia and Peru; the early colonial era in the southern United States, particularly Native American interactions with European colonial powers; and broader issues related to agency and social change. 

Rob is co-director, with David Moore (Warren Wilson College) and Christopher Rodning (Tulane University), of the Exploring Joara Project, which is studying the archaeology of Native American societies in the western North Carolina Piedmont, especially the nature of early encounters between these native peoples and European colonists and explorers.

Since 2001, the Exploring Joara Project has conducted extensive excavations and surveys throughout the upper Catawba Valley and its tributaries, focusing in particular on the Berry site.  Berry was a large (12 acres) Native American site occupied from A.D. 1400-1625 and is believed to be the town of Joara, visited by both the Hernando de Soto and Juan Pardo expeditions during the middle of the sixteenth century.  In 1567, Pardo built a fort at Joara, Fort San Juan, which is the earliest European settlement in the interior of the United States.  Rob and his colleagues have identified five burned buildings associated with a wide range of sixteenth-century Spanish artifiacts at the northern end of the Berry site, and they believe that these buildings were occupied by the thirty Spanish soldiers stationed at Fort San Juan prior to its destruction by native forces in  1568.  Their research has been funded by grants from the National Geographic Society and the National Science Foundation, and has appeared in  publications like Smithsonian Magazine and American Archaeology Magazine.  Their work is shedding new light on the process and practice of colonialism along the frontiers of Spanish La Florida.