M. J.  Evans earned her doctorate at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School in 1978 in the Department of Geography.  She focused her early research on environmental perception, perception of mapped information, persistent landscape features, ancient sites, and human cultures and habitats.  In her undergraduate degree awarded cum laude at Utica College of Syracuse University in 1966, she majored in psychology with a minor in geography.  Her doctoral research drew on her undergraduate themes of perception as applied to landscape analysis and human behavior.  

 
From 1969 to 1974, she taught geography at Utica College.  Her second academic position was at the newly organized State University of New York’s Empire State College, where she taught for 31 years.  Her teaching emphasis there focused on adult earners, human geography, earth science, environmental problems, and human impacts on the environment.  There she earned the rank of full professor.  


Over her academic career, her personal travels took her to ancient sites in Israel, Turkey, Ireland, Great Britain, and France, where she focused on ancient enigmatic landscapes in an effort to tease out their meaning for early peoples.  She examined and studied numerous sites in detail, such as Qumran in the basin of the Dead Sea; Newgrange in Ireland; Stonehenge, Avebury and Silbury Hill in southern England; and coastal landscapes in Scotland.  To deepen her understanding of the concept of heresy, a topic she explored recently, she studied the Dead Sea Scrolls material, the Templar’s history, and traveled to southern France where she visited landscape mysteries in the Rennes le Chateau and Montsegur areas, and the Cathar castles. 
Beginning in 1996 she traveled with Zecharia Sitchin and his groups to ancient sites in Greece, and on Santorini and Crete, in addition to explorations in Israel, Italy, and on the islands of Malta. 

Dr. Evans retired as Professor Emeritus from her full-time faculty position at SUNY’s Empire State College in 2004.  She now lives in Syracuse, New York.

Books by M. J. Evans:
The Legacy of Zecharia Sitchin. This book is a tribute to the life and work of Zecharia Sitchin. He was a pioneer who left a great legacy behind regarding our ancient past and the origins of mankind. He taught us to think in new ways based on his breakthrough research and exciting discoveries. Sitchin was one of about 200 people who could translate the first form of writing on the earth – ancient Sumerian cuneiform script. By combining translated text with modern scientific knowledge and archaeological discoveries, he pieced together in his books a more complete mosaic of mankind’s shrouded past. He believed that mythological stories were not figments of people’s imaginations, but records of events that had actually taken place, and spent his life proving it. As modern science catches up with ancient knowledge, we have continued to discover, largely through Sitchin’s work, that the gods were once here and that they may be coming back. M. J. Evans, Ph.D., presents in this work an extremely well researched overview of Sitchin’s contributions to the knowledge of ourselves and our true origins. His work is put within the framework of a new paradigm, which is looming on the horizon. It will grow as our minds continue to open and new discoveries continue to corroborate his findings. 

Of Heaven and Earth: Essays Presented at the First Sitchin Studies Day, 1996, The Book Tree, contributing author. Contains information on Sitchin’s theories about the origins of mankind and the intervention of intelligence from beyond the earth in ancient times. He and other contributors offer a scholarly approach to the ancient astronaut theory. Chapters by Zecharia Sitchin, Neil Freer, J. Antonio Huneeus, Father Charles Moore, V. Susan Ferguson, and two university professors, Madeleine Briskin and Marlene Evans. Were certain myths actual events instead of figments of imagination? They all agree on this, and that Sitchin’s work is the early part of a new paradigm — one that is beginning to shake the very foundations of religion, archaeology and our society in general.