Prof. Liye Xie is an Associate Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM). She completed her PhD in 2014 from the University of Arizona. Dr. Xie is a problem-oriented, interdisciplinary researcher and an anthropological archaeologist with a background in China’s historically-oriented approach to archaeology.

Xie has several ongoing projects, but says that once these wrap up, she has plans for future pursuits with a completely different line of inquiry to consider the technological traditions through cultural transmission, focusing on how people taught and learned the technologies, and how these teaching and learning processes affected the formation and changes in technological traditions over time.

Although Xie is helping to shape the narrative for a particular archaeological story and the tale of the tools of the past, she feels very much shaped by her chosen discipline. Xie attributes her metamorphosis to the experience of experimental archaeology not always turning out the results she expected.