archaeology

#1278 Paul Pettitt: Human Mortuary Practices, and Other Animals' Awareness of Death

Jul 10, 2026

Dr. Paul Pettitt is Professor of Palaeolithic Archaeology at Durham University. He specializes in Palaeolithic art and in the long-term development of the treatment of the dead. His survey of the biological and behavioral evolution of Homo sapiens was published by Thames and Hudson in 2022 (Homo Sapiens Rediscovered: The Scientific Revolution Rewriting our Origins). He is currently researching aspects of the visual psychology that underpins the earliest cave art. More»
#1036 Roderick McIntosh: Archaeology, Urbanism, State Formation and Human Evolution in Africa

Dec 23, 2024

Dr. Roderick McIntosh is Clayton Stephenson Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Yale University, Curator of Anthropology at the Peabody Museum, New Haven, and Honorary Distinguished Professor of Archaeology at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. His interests are in African and Old World comparative prehistory, intellectual history of prehistoric archaeology, ethnicity and specialization and the origin of authority in complex society, urbanism, geomorphology and palaeoclimate, and more topics. Dr. McIntosh has been a Guggenheim Fellow, twice a Fulbright Senior Fellow (Senegal and Mali), and has held a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford). More»
#973 Jade d'Alpoim Guedes: Foraging, Agriculture, Crop Dispersal, and Climate Change

Jul 29, 2024

Dr. Jade d’Alpoim Guedes is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington, in Seattle. Dr. Guedes is an environmental archaeologist and ethnobiologist who employs an interdisciplinary research program to understand how humans adapted their foraging practices and agricultural strategies to new environments and have developed resilience in the face of climatic and social change. More»
#828 Greger Larson: Animal Domestication and Human Evolution

Aug 31, 2023

Dr. Greger Larson is a Professor in the School of Archaeology at the University of Oxford and Director of the Wellcome Trust Palaeogenomics and Bio-Archaeology Research Network (PaleoBARN). His research interests include evolutionary genomics, ancient DNA, domestication, human and animal dispersal, and phylogenetics. His work on the domestication of canines and the origin of the domestic dog has provided insights into the prehistoric bond between humans and early dogs. More»
#418 Frederick Coolidge: Neuropsychology, Cognitive Archaeology, and Human Evolution

Jan 15, 2021

Dr. Frederick Coolidge is Professor of Psychology and Co-Director of Undergraduate Education in Psychology at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. He teaches introductory and advanced undergraduate statistics, cognitive evolution, evolutionary neuropsychology, abnormal psychology, and sleep and dreams. He has received three teaching awards including the lifetime designation, University of Colorado Presidential Teaching Scholar, and he received the UCCS Letters, Arts, and Sciences Annual Outstanding Research and Creative Works Award, in 2004, and the UCCS Annual Faculty Award for Excellence in Research in 2006. For the month of March 2015, he was appointed Senior Visiting Scholar at Oxford University, Keble College, UK. For the past 6 years, he has been a Visiting Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, India, teaching courses on brain evolution and sleep and dreams. He’s the coeditor of Squeezing Minds From Stones: Cognitive Archaeology and the Evolution of the Human Mind. More»
#375 Karenleigh Overmann: Cognitive Archaeology, Numeracy, and Language

Oct 8, 2020

Dr. Karenleigh A. Overmann is an associate professor of anthropology (adjunct) at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs (UCCS) Center for Cognitive Archaeology. She recently completed two years of postdoctoral research at the University of Bergen (MSCA individual fellowship, EU project 785793). She earned her doctorate in archaeology from the University of Oxford as a Clarendon scholar. She also has a master's degree (psychology) and bachelor's (anthropology, philosophy, English) from UCCS. She’s the editor of Squeezing Minds From Stones: Cognitive Archaeology and the Evolution of the Human Mind. More»
#336 Melinda Zeder: Domestication, And The Origins and Dispersal of Agriculture

May 21, 2020

Dr. Melinda Zeder is Curator Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology of the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. Her zooarchaeological research has revolutionized the understanding of animal domestication. She has conducted extensive fieldwork throughout the Near East, including in Iran, Israel, Turkey, and Syria. Her research focuses on the origins of plant and animal domestication, and the impacts of agriculture on human prehistory. She has also pioneered approaches that combine archaeological and genetic analyses of plant and animal remains from archaeological sites. More»
#313 Robert Kelly: The Fifth Beginning, And The Lifeways Of Hunter-Gatherers

Mar 27, 2020

Dr. Robert Kelly is Professor of Archaeology at the University of Wyoming. Dr. Kelly has shaped and contributed much to our understanding of hunter-gatherer societies. He has a deep interest in Western North American archaeology, especially in the Great Basin area. Current understanding of hunter-gatherer mobility and foraging patterns are also influenced strongly by his research, fieldwork, and ethnology. By examining the Pleistocene colonization of the Americas by examining artifacts and lithic technology, Dr. Kelly reconstructs past life-ways and compares them to current foraging societies, and examines human adaptation to climate change during different periods in the past. He’s the author of books like The Foraging Spectrum: Diversity in Hunter-Gatherer Lifeways, and The Fifth Beginning: What Six Million Years of Human History Can Tell Us about Our Future. More»
#266 Lyn Wadley: Archaeology, And The Evolution of Human Cognition

Dec 9, 2019

Dr. Lyn Wadley is jointly Honorary Professor of Archaeology in the School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies, and the Evolutionary Studies Institute, at University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. She directs a Wits-recognized programme called ACACIA (Ancient Cognition and Culture in Africa). Her specialty is the African Stone Age: Middle Stone Age (which lasted from approximately 300,000 to 25,000 years ago) and Later Stone Age (the last 25,000 years). She began her career researching social and ecological issues during the past 25,000 years of the Later Stone Age in southern Africa. Data for her interpretations were obtained from sites in Namibia and South Africa. Dr. Wadley’s current research is dedicated to the cognition of people who lived in the Middle Stone Age. More»
#161 Ian Gilligan: The Evolution of Clothing and Agriculture

Apr 8, 2019

Dr. Ian Gilligan is Honorary Associate Professor in the Department of Archaeology of the University of Sydney. He graduated in psychology (UNSW) and medicine (Sydney University) before studying prehistoric archaeology (Sydney University) and biological anthropology (PhD ANU). He specializes in the origin of clothing and the role of textiles in the transition to agriculture. He also has an interest in traditional clothing in Aboriginal Australia, particularly in Tasmania during the last ice age. In addition, he explores the wider psychological and philosophical aspects of wearing clothes. He’s also the author of the recent book Climate, Clothing, and Agriculture in Prehistory: Linking Evidence, Causes, and Effects (2018). More»