The Andrew Fiske Memorial Center for Archaeological Research was established in 1999 through the generosity of the late Alice Fiske and her family as a living memorial to her late husband Andrew. As an international leader in interdisciplinary research, the Fiske Center promotes a vision of archaeology as a multi-faceted, theoretically rigorous field that integrates a variety of analytical perspectives into its studies of the cultural and biological dimensions of colonization, urbanization and industrialization over the past thousand years in the Americas and Atlantic World.

Intellectually the Center Staff is committed to building a highly integrated archaeology that embraces the multiplicity of methodological and theoretical approaches the field offers. As part of a public university, the Center maintains a program of local archaeology with a special emphasis on research that meets the needs of cities, towns and Tribal Nations in New England and the greater Northeast. It also seeks to understand the local as part of a larger Atlantic World.