Dr. John W. Arthur is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg. Dr. Arthur was awarded the USF St. Petersburg Frank E. Duckwall Florida Studies Professorship (2020-2022) and was named a fellow in the illustrious Explorers Club. He is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. He has worked in Ethiopia since 1995, conducting ceramic ethnoarchaeological and Holocene archaeological research. He was part of an NSF-sponsored research project that discovered a human burial dating to 4,500 years ago and led to the extraction of ancient DNA, sequencing an ancient African genome for the first time. This discovery was published in the premier journal Science (2015), with subsequent publications in the journals PNAS (2021) and Nature (2022). He has also worked with the Gamo community in southern Ethiopia, understanding the importance of beer in their daily and ritual lives. While investigating household ceramic assemblages in Gamo, he discovered how to interpret beer production in the ancient past, which has been documented in places such as Ethiopia, Sudan, the United Kingdom, France, Greece, and Mexico. He has been invited to give talks in Japan, France, and Germany, as well as prominent American institutions such as Rice University, Stanford University, and New York University. His new book, Beer - A Global Journey Through the Past and Present, was published in 2022 by Oxford University Press. In addition to his Ethiopian research, he has been excavating a shell mound at the Weeden Island site in Pinellas County, Florida. Dr. Arthur also serves as the President of the non-profit organization Alliance for Weedon Island Archaeological Research and Education.