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Each August staff and volunteers begin to construct Black Rock City, a temporary city located in the hostile and haunting Black Rock Desert of northwestern Nevada. Every September nearly seventy thousand people occupy the city for Burning Man, an event that creates the sixth-largest population center in Nevada. By mid-September the infrastructure that supported the community is fully dismantled, and by October the land on which the city lay is scrubbed of evidence of its existence. The Archaeology of Burning Man examines this process of building, occupation, and destruction.

For nearly a decade Carolyn L. White has employed archaeological methods to analyze the various aspects of life and community in and around Burning Man and Black Rock City. With a syncretic approach, this work in active-site archaeology provides both a theoretical basis and a practical demonstration of the potential of this new field to reexamine the most fundamental conceptions in the social sciences.

Learn more...

Interview with Carolyn L. White on Life Elsewhere with Norman B. March 29, 2020.​

​Interview with Carolyn L. White on KFAI, FM 90.3, Northern Sun News with Don Olson, a one hour public affairs program covering a wide variety of topics, April 9, 2020.
Interview with Carolyn White by Geoffrey Riley on Jefferson Public Radio, April 15, 2020.
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Interview with Carolyn L. White on The Tom Sumner Program, April 16, 2020.
Interview ​with Carolyn White by Shelly Irwin on WGVU, 88.5FM, The Morning Show.
Carolyn White on Conversations with Charlie Dyer, on ihubradio.com.



​Carolyn L. White is a professor in the Anthropology Department at the University of Nevada, Reno, where she holds the Mamie Kleberg Chair in Historic Preservation and is the director of the Anthropology Research Museum. She is the author of numerous books and articles, including The Materiality of Individuality: Archaeological Studies of Individual Lives (ed.) and The Archaeology of Place and Space in the West (ed. with E. Dale). Her work has been supported by Winterthur, Garden, and Library, Fulbright, and Wenner Gren.