Alumni Spotlights are Q&A's with former Brandeis student-athletes, across a myriad of disciplines, as they reflect on their Brandeis experience and how it has shaped their lives today. Read more spotlight features here.
Name: Cheryl Makarewicz '99
Sport: Women's Track and Field
Current job: Professor of Zooarchaeology and Stable Isotope Science , University of Kiel, Germany
BIO
Cheryl Makarewicz came to Brandeis from Spencerport, New York. She was an outstanding runner in the 800-meter run and as part of the 4x400-meter relay in the late 1990s, earning 11 All-America honors and setting two school records that still stand today. She graduated cum laude with highest honors in Anthropology and a minor in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies. While at Brandeis, she also played flute in the Wind Ensemble, and participated in her first archaeological field excavation at Hayonim Cave in Israel. After a summer spent on further archaelogical digs, Makarewicz came back to Waltham to run with the Greater Boston Track Club while working at both the Brandeis bookstore and Wayland public schools, before returning to Israel and then onward to Ukraine for more archaeological excavation work.
In 2007, Makarewicz earned her Ph.D. from Harvard and then went on to do post-doctoral work at Stanford. In 2010, she gained a tenured professorship in Zooarchaeology and Stable Isotope Science in the Institute for Prehistoric and Protohistoric Archaeology at the University of Kiel (Germany), and in 2024 embarked on a dual professorship in the School for Archaeology and Maritime Cultures at the University of Haifa. She directs several labs and supervises an international cohort of graduate students and post-doctoral fellows while also serving as an editor for two major international journals. Through research grants awarded by numerous agencies including the National Geographic Council for Research and Exploration and the German National Science Foundation, and the European Research Council, Makarewicz has been able to further explore the origins of food production and village life in the Near East
Cheryl Makarewicz will be one of six Judges inducted into the Brandeis Athletics Hall of Fame during
Homecoming on September 28th.
Registration for the Hall of Fame is open now!
Q: What attracted you to Brandeis in the first place?
I was strongly attracted to the rigorous academic environment offered by Brandeis and the importance placed on challenging standard narratives through critical thinking. I also found that Brandeis' engagement with social justice and commitment to addressing social inequality resonated as deeply with me then as it does now. Indeed, a core aspect of my current archaeological research seeks to understand exactly that: how did social differentiation within communities emerge, why did people concede autonomy and power to others, and how did these imbalanced power structures persist?
Q: Describe your overall experience as a student-athlete. What does it mean to you now/what did it mean to you while you were an undergraduate?
My experience as a student-athlete is probably best described as extremely intense and exciting, but perhaps also a tiny bit ascetic. I was totally engrossed in all these fascinating topics and texts we were tackling in my Anthropology and NEJS courses, grappling with archaeological theory and puzzling out legal texts in the original Akkadian cuneiform script - really intellectually demanding stuff that called for a lot of reading and deep thinking. At the same, I was devoting large swaths of time and physical energy to running every single day, doing my best to keep up with my teammates in training and in competition. So it was all very full on, all the time. The sacrifice was that I probably missed out on some of the looser, more impromptu happenings on campus and very late nights out and about, but I had a close group of friends and, eventually, my sister Karen who also attended Brandeis, that made for a really wonderful and fun social life. I would do it all over again.
Q: Do you have any advice for current or future Brandeis Student-Athletes?
The advice I would give to Brandeis student-athletes is drawn from guidance given to me by my fabulously erudite and thoughtful advisors Prof. Tzvi Abusch (NEJS) and Prof. Rick Parmentier (ANTH). Don't overextend yourself. Think carefully about what you want to accomplish over the longer term and how your time might be best invested to achieve that. This is certainly easier said than done! You will have many interests that reach beyond your athletic discipline and your studies, and you should certainly pursue those and see where they take you. But you can't do it all, and there will be times where you might have to step back a bit in one arena in order to thrive in another.
Q: Do you keep in touch with any of your former Brandeis teammates? How?
I have been occasionally in touch with my teammates, I've been really lucky that many of them have reached out to me over the years to say 'hello' and check in to see how things are going. Between living overseas and regular fieldwork that takes me to remote places where only a satellite phone is the only means of communication, it can be tough to remain linked in with folks back in the US. The now archaic medium of Facebook has been the primary way I've been able to connect with teammates, and it's been wonderful seeing their relationships bloom, their families grow, and their successes take flight.
Q: Looking back on your career at Brandeis, do you have any one or two moments that you look back on and cherish?
For me, it is a flow of moments gently blurring together that I treasure. The excitement of moving into East as a first-year with my Babci (grandmother) perched on the side of the bed directing me and my parents where to put boxes. Playing every every week the 'Theatre of Magic' pinball machine with my 4x400m teammates Karyn Ferdella, Nell Harder (Getz), and Victoria Petrillo (Finkelshteyn), The smell of the crisp autumn air while excavating the farmhouse behind the campus for the Introduction to Archaeology Course. Attending the Peace by Peace demonstration in Copley Square after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. Debating theories of practices and semiotics in anthropology seminars. My Grandma visiting me on Sundays with a full supply of groceries and an early supper at the 99 restaurant down the street from campus. The first time I placed individually in the 800m at Nationals. Going into Boston on Sunday with friends to peruse the shelves at the Brattle Book Shop. The cozy feeling of settling in Goldfarb library as snow thickly settled outside. It is these moments and many others that have sustained and supported me over the years.
Q: What kind of archaeology do you do? Where does it take you?
I would consider myself an anthropological archaeologist ultimately interested in the origins of village life, the spread of mobile pastoralism, and understanding how animals and plants were used by humans not only as a means to daily subsistence but also as a powerful vector for achieving particular socio-political goals. I often describe myself as wearing simultaneously three different hats to help me investigate these fundamental pieces of our shared human history. My zooarchaeology hat I first acquired while at Brandeis where for my senior thesis I analysed thousands of animal bones and teeth from a Neolithic site in Turkey to identify the early uptake of domesticated livestock there. By documenting the species abundance, distribution of different skeletal element parts, animal age at death, and bone breakage, I am able to establish ancient hunting strategies, livestock production goals, feasting events, and culturally-driven food preparation techniques. My stable isotope biogeochemistry hat allows me to document the dietary and mobility histories of both people and animals, and also investigate how ancient cultivars were irrigated, manured, and harvested. Finally, my field archaeology hat - a particularly fun hat that most might imagine as an Indiana Jones-type hat (although I confess mine is not!), engages me directly with the archaeological record especially in Jordan where I have directed several excavations of Neolithic villages over ten thousand years old. All in all, my archaeological research takes me all over, across the Middle East, Russia, Kazakhstan, China, Uzbekistan and Mongolia.
Q: What was your path to that field, and how did you land in Germany to teach?
My path to archaeology reflected my many intersecting interests that were cultivated while at Brandeis. I loved history but I was also intrigued by anthropology which [got me] thinking about how individuals, communities, and culturally constructed ways of doing things contributed to human innovation and adaptation. I was also interested in ecology and how human activities impacted landscapes, and I also liked being outside, physical challenges, and exploring new places. Archaeology tied these interests together!
I initially landed in Germany as a professor at the University of Kiel for fairly pragmatic reasons: there was a position open there in Zooarchaeology and Stable Isotope Science that fit me perfectly. I was lucky to have a friend from grad school see that position listed because I totally missed it, and he managed to get in touch with me while I was in the field in Jordan - with a couple of days to spare before the deadline! I remember frantically trying to find a FedEx office in Amman because only hard copy applications were being accepted. An interesting side note is that when I was in middle school, my family lived about twenty miles from the university where I now work . My father was on a Fulbright at a Max Planck Institute in Plön, and we all would occasionally go to Kiel to poke around. That temporal-spatial connection is very fitting for an archaeologist.
