Elizabeth Weiss

Elizabeth Weiss holds a Ph.D. from the University of Arkansas in Environmental Dynamics (an interdisciplinary program involving anthropology and the geosciences), which she completed in 2001. From 2002 to 2004 she was a post-doctoral research associate at the Canadian Museum of Civilization. She landed her dream job at San José State University – as a professor of anthropology curating the largest single-site prehistoric collection west of the Mississippi – in 2004. In record time, and before the age of 40, Elizabeth made full professor.

Elizabeth is the author, with attorney James W. Springer, of the controversial and provocative book Repatriation and Erasing the Past (University of Florida Press, 2020), which takes a critical look at repatriation laws and the ideology behind these laws. This book started a savage and sustained cancel culture attack that began with over a thousand academics calling for its censorship. Her other books include Reading the Bones: Activity, Biology, and Culture (University Press of Florida, 2017) and Paleopathology in Perspective: Bone Health and Disease through Time (Rowman and Littlefield, 2014). In addition to her books, Elizabeth has written over three dozen academic articles ranging from looking at 2-million-year-old early humans to determining ways forensic anthropologists may estimate victim age, to reconstructing past lifestyles – including health, violence, and activity patterns – in pre-contact Californian Indians.

Elizabeth has written widely on Libertarian issues, such as freedom of speech, the importance of individual rights, and protection from government overreach. She has argued against laws, such as the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, that put Indian creation myths ahead of scientific inquiry in order to repatriate and rebury America’s first peoples – a clear violation of the First Amendment’s Separation of Church and State.

Elizabeth has been featured in the New York Times, USA Today, the Washington Examiner, Epoch Times, the National Review, Science, the Mercury News, the New Criterion, American Greatness, and the College Fix. From 2023 to 2024, she was a Heterodox Academy Faculty Fellow at their Center for Academic Pluralism in New York City. She is also a National Association of Scholars Board Member.