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Ashley Hampton is a doctoral candidate at the University of Montana specializing in gender and household archaeology of the Interior British Columbia. Her doctoral research has geographically focused on Western North American archaeology, with a particular emphasis on the archaeology of the Mid-Fraser Canyon, British Columbia, Canada in collaboration with Xwísten, the Bridge River Band. Her theoretical focus is on understanding hunter-gatherer-fisher division of labor, social identity, and access to power at the household level. Her archaeological research seeks to understand past cultural conceptions of social identity and the diverse ways in which social identity has been (and continues to be) tied to inequality. By analyzing the interconnections of social identity and social inequality, her work seeks to understand how and why inequality manifests at a given time and how it maps onto previous identities (or potentially creates new kinds of socially-constructed identities of class and status). She achieves this by examining changes in spatial patterns of activity within a singular multi-generational housepit (HP54) located within the Bridge River site. Her future research includes further analysis of the spatial correlates of social identity in houses throughout the Northwest Coast region, Columbia Plateau, and Fraser Valley. Additionally, she is interested in studying past relationships between the Mid-Fraser and other nearby valleys at the macro-scale level of village-wide social networks.

Ashley is excited to teach an archeogaming course. As a form of interactive learning, gaming provides a formative method for creating/sharing knowledge of the past. As an interactive form of digital media, it is also well-suited to engage individuals who would not otherwise seek out historical information. She is interested in how games communicate archaeological and cultural heritage information. A successful example of game-based learning about history can be seen in those produced by the DIG-IT! Games Studio.SheI would help teach students how to create interactive media as a method of pedagogy and as a repository for archaeological knowledge.