Michael D. Mathiowetz earned a Ph.D. in Anthropology at UC Riverside in 2011 and currently is a research assistant at the Getty Research Institute. His research focuses on questions of cultural change, the dynamic social networks that connected societies in Mesoamerica, west Mexico, and the U.S. Southwest/Mexican Northwest, and the legacies of these interactions among descendant communities. He has conducted fieldwork in the Aztatlán and Casas Grandes regions of west and northwest Mexico and museum and archival research on legacy collections for over two decades. He has published through British Archaeological Reports, Dumbarton Oaks, El Colegio de Michoacán, Harvard University Press/C.H. Beck, Journal of the Southwest, Journal of Archaeological Research, Kiva, and other venues. Co-edited volumes include Flower Worlds: Religion, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest (with Andrew D. Turner, 2021) and Reassessing the Aztatlán World: Ethnogenesis and Cultural Continuity in Northwest Mesoamerica (with John M. D. Pohl, 2024).