PARDIS ZAHEDI, PHD ’07: Unearthing Stories and Building Community

With a career that bridges academic rigor and community collaboration, Pardis Zahedi ’07 is redefining what it means to study the past.

She has followed, rather fearlessly, a non-linear career path. Her work has spanned continents and cultures, always grounded in a belief that heritage belongs to the people who live it. Pardis is following her heart in the community-rooted heritage work she is doing, and she is determined to let curiosity guide her. Her personal and professional pursuits are guided by a powerful and deep respect for the people and places that hold history.

Pardis’ journey—from a small town in upstate New York to the U.S. Virgin Islands by way of Europe, Central America, and Southeast Asia—has been anything but conventional. “My career has not been linear,” she shares. “That’s because I’ve always followed what I was interested in, and I’ve always had a strong pull toward both the natural and the cultural world.” That sense of purpose, rooted in curiosity and a commitment to community, has defined a career focused as much on relationships as it is on ruins.

She traces the roots of that curiosity back to her time at Millbrook. Pardis came to Millbrook as a boarder in her IVth form year. Encouraged by a friend and supported by generous financial aid, she stepped onto campus not knowing quite what to expect. She quickly found a sense of belonging. “I feel like my best memories of Millbrook are living on a campus with no distractions,” she reflects. “It was an exercise in being a part of a community, really, in the truest sense.” Though she admits she didn’t fully realize her potential as a student then, the seeds of her future were being planted: “A focus on the environment, on community, on small-scale stewardship and public service…all of that started at Millbrook.”

An advanced Anthropology course with faculty member Trip Powers during her senior year helped unlock her intellectual passion. “That was the beginning,” she says. “It was just fascinating to me—learning about how people live, how they have lived, and how that’s changed. I remember realizing: ‘Getting paid to travel around the world and write things about interesting people and interesting cultures—that’s a job?’”

Zahedi has spent the years since proving that it is. She earned her bachelor’s degree in anthropology and archaeology at SUNY New Paltz after gathering credits at other institutions of higher learning, including Dickinson and Green Mountain colleges. Heritage preservation and horticulture were the focus of her early work out of college. She created a Maya Trail for the Belize Botanic Garden and reconstructed a traditional Mayan hut in a nine-month job as an ethnoecologist. She also led a team in reviving an ancient lo’i patch on a permaculture farm in North Kohala, Hawaii, among other work there.

By 2013, Pardis was following another path, one that led her to St. Eustatius, locally known as ‘Statia,’ in the Dutch Caribbean, working for the St. Eustatius Center for Archaeological Research (SECAR).

As an archaeologist for SECAR, she conducted archaeological excavations, surveys, and managed the center’s artifact collection, while launching several community-based programs to close the gap between local residents and visiting researchers. “There’s a really big disconnect in the Caribbean between the scientific community, especially the visiting scientists, and the local community. Pretty early on, my commitment was to bridge that gap.”

She organized community engagement programs like “Drive-By Archaeology,” displaying signage at dig sites to spark conversations with locals. This idea led to her collaborate with a partner, Welsh marine ecologist, Matthew Davies, who would later become her husband. Pardis and Matt organized a monthly gathering, “Science Cafe,” where researchers would present to the community in an informal setting with snacks and drinks. Presentations covered a wide range of subjects, from colonial ceramics and long-forgotten shipwrecks to tropic birds, microplastics, sea turtle nesting, and coral restoration.

Her work centered not just on excavation, but on collaboration and storytelling. “We were trying to do something different—something more transparent and reciprocal. My research was specifically focused on building a conversation around the value of oral history…and that it can actually enhance the benefits of archaeological evidence.” That commitment shaped her research, blending oral histories with archival materials and material remains—from coral masonry to blue beads used as currency by enslaved people in the colonial Caribbean—to explore how Caribbean communities connect to the past.

When Pardis and Matt were married, they left the Caribbean for the UK to pursue graduate studies. An accelerated master’s degree at the University of York then led Pardis to research in the U.S., focusing her thesis on how material heritage is used to represent legacies of Black Resistance in American museums, drawing from the colonial period through present-day. This work was deeply influenced by the cultural moment of the Black Lives Matter protests and included visits to institutions like the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the National Civil Rights Museum, and the Underground Railroad Freedom Center. Pardis would eventually follow this research, back to the U.S. with a job in St. Louis, Missouri, where she worked as the Superintendent of Historic Sites—managing cultural institutions, heritage programming, museum exhibits, collections, and archives.

In 2019, Pardis was offered a doctoral fellowship as part of the Enduring Materialities of Colonialism: Temporality, Spatiality, and Memory project, a contemporary heritage project focused on colonial legacies of the Danish West Indies. Over the next five years, she split her time between the U.S. Virgin Islands, where she conducted fieldwork, and Denmark, where she worked as a lecturer in the Department of Sustainable Heritage and Archaeology at Aarhus University. In her doctoral research, she explored how contemporary communities engage with colonial remnants and heritage sites in a culturally diverse landscape shaped by centuries of migration and layered histories. She examined the use of mined coral in colonial architecture and its connection to modern reef decline and the cultural significance, through folklore, oral history, and a culture of care, of the non-native African baobab trees. Her research focused intently on the Danish colonial period, their exodus following the 1917 U.S. purchase of the islands, and the subsequent American influence on culture.

Today, Pardis works as an exhibit specialist and project lead for the National Park Service, Historic Preservation Training Center, through which she leads historic preservation projects in national parks across the Southeastern United States and U.S. Caribbean territories. In her spare time, she works as an independent archaeological consultant and serves on the boards of the St. George Village Botanical Garden and Finding Your Archives a Home (FYAH), and as the vice president of the St. Croix Archaeological Society, through which she offers her expertise in community heritage, museum development, and preservation. Though she recently completed her PhD, she sees her work as just beginning. “This work is about relationships,” she says. “It’s about listening. And it’s about giving people tools to tell their own stories.” As the only archaeologist currently living in St. Croix, she continues to build tools, foster trust, and bring buried histories to the surface—one site, one story, one conversation at a time.