Karenleigh A. Overmann

Karenleigh A. Overmann is an associate professor of anthropology (adjunct) and director of the Center for Cognitive Archaeology at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. She earned her doctorate in archaeology at the University of Oxford as a Clarendon scholar in 2016. She was an MSCA postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Bergen 2018–2020 (EU project 785793) and a visiting scholar at the University of Pittsburgh 2020–2021. Her research focuses on how societies become numerate and literate by using and modifying material forms over generations of collaborative effort, the effect this elaborational mechanism has on conceptual content, and how material forms become increasingly refined to elicit specific behavioral and psychological responses. To date, she has published 40 journal articles, 19 book chapters, two co-edited special journal issues, and five books, including The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Archaeology (Oxford, 2023, co-edited with Thomas Wynn and Frederick L. Coolidge) and The Materiality of Numbers: Emergence and Elaboration from Prehistory to Present (Cambridge, 2023).