Kristina Douglass

Kristina Guild Douglass is an American archaeologist and interdisciplinary climate scholar whose research examines long-term interactions between human societies and their environments, with particular attention to climate variability, social memory, and adaptation. Her work integrates archaeology, paleoecology, and anthropology and emphasizes community-centered and collaborative research approaches, especially in Madagascar and the western Indian Ocean region. In 2025, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellows award for "investigating how past human societies and environments co-evolved and adapted to climate variability." She was awarded a Carnegie Fellowship in 2021 for her work in community-centered archaeology.

Life As a child, Douglass moved all over the world living in Togo, Kenya, Cameroon, and Ukraine, and spent several years in Madagascar. She went on to graduate work at Yale University, doing her Ph.D. field work in Madagascar. Douglass' work investigates how people pass on knowledge over time.

Works