Collaborator
George Nicholas is Distinguished Professor of Archaeology at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia; Professor, Global Institute for Collaborative Research and Education, Hokkaido University, Japan; and Senior Research Fellow in History and Archaeology, Flinders University, South Australia. He was founding director of SFU’s Indigenous Archaeology Program in Kamloops, B.C. (1991–2005), He has worked closely with the Secwepemc and other First Nations in British Columbia, and Indigenous groups worldwide for over 35 years.
Nicholas’ research focuses on Indigenous peoples and archaeology, intellectual property issues relating to heritage, the archaeology and human ecology of wetlands, and archaeological theory and practice. He was the director of the international Intellectual Property Issues in Cultural Heritage (IPinCH) project (2008–2016), which received the inaugural “Partnership Award” from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada in2013. He is also recipient of the 2021 Warren Gill Award for Community Engagement.
Nicholas is recognized internationally as one of the leading commentators on Indigenous Archaeology and related topics. His books include: Working as Indigenous Archaeologists: Reckoning New Paths Between Past and Present Lives (2025); Being and Becoming Indigenous Archaeologists (2010); and At a Crossroads: Archaeology and First Peoples in Canada (1997). His 2008 entry on “Native Peoples and Archaeology” in the Encyclopedia of Archaeology provided the first full definition of Indigenous Archaeology. He also contributed entries on this topic to the Encyclopedia of Archaeology (2008; 2023); Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology (2014, 2019), Oxford Bibliography of Anthropology (2014, 2020), and The Oxford Companion to Archaeology(2012), plus many book chapters and journal articles, blogs, and public lectures.