Conkey, the eldest of five siblings, graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1965[1] with an ancient history and art history double major,[4] and shortly got the chance to go to Jordan - in what is now the West Bank - to work in biblical archaeology. When she then submitted graduate applications to the anthropology departments at the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania, she was told she needed to take a year of undergraduate anthropology (which was not available at Mount Holyoke College) before they could grant her a final admission.[5] She and a friend then spent a summer in New York, where she obtained a job with the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research as a librarian and eventually became a grant analyst. When accepted at the Oriental Institute, she went back to Chicago to attend and work a part-time job as an editorial assistant at Current Anthropology.[5]
Earning her Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Chicago in 1978,[2] she then taught at San Jose State University for six years, and joined the anthropology faculty of SUNY/Binghamton in 1982, where she also served as co-director of Women’s Studies. She accepted an associate professorship in anthropology at Berkeley in 1987.[2] Alongside her fieldwork, other research topics and publications have addressed pedagogy and the teaching of archaeology; the development and use of internet resources in the teaching of Introduction to Archaeology (having received several instructional technology grants for this); as well as initiating and implementing an archaeology outreach program in local schools.[2] In 2009, she received the Chancellor’s Award for Advancing Institutional Excellence from Berkeley, for her work for diversity and equal opportunity. She has also won the Distinguished Teaching Award (1996) and the Award for Educational Initiatives (2001) and has leveraged the start-up funds for a Multi-Media Teaching Laboratory for the Department of Anthropology.[2] In July 1997, Conkey was named the Class of 1960 Professor of Anthropology, a rare endowed chair.
Professor Conkey became President of the Society for American Archaeology in 2009.[6]