RESEARCH INTERESTS AND EXPERIENCE
My interests are in the late Pleistocene-early Holocene prehistory of the western Mediterranean, especially southern Europe and the Maghreb, emphasizing human-environmental relationships and the interdisciplinary analysis of palaeoecological, palaeoeconomic and bioarchaeological data.
Since the 1960s, I have focussed on the relationship between past human populations and the environment, especially with regard to the transition from hunting-gathering to food production in the circum-Mediterranean. As a student I was a member of research teams in Turkey and Syria (1963-64), Texas (1965-66), Egypt (1966-67). I spent the summer of 1970 in northern Afghanistan with the American Museum of Natural History expedition directed by Louis Dupree. From 1972-83 I directed my own project in Algeria on "Prehistoric Cultural Ecology of Capsian Escargotières" funded initially by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (http://www.wennergren.org/)and subsequently by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC - http://www.sshrc.ca). My early collaborators on that project, Achiel Gautier and Fekri Hassan, remain good friends. From 1984-89 I co-directed a project with Mary Jackes (http://www.ualberta.ca/~mjackes) and Christopher Meiklejohn (University of Winnipeg) on "The Mesolithic-Neolithic Transition in Southern Portugal", also funded by SSHRC. From 1989-97 I participated with Margherita Mussi (Università di Roma) and Silvano Agostini in a joint Canadian-Italian project on "Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene Subsistence and Settlement in the Fucino Basin, Central Italy" with funding from both the University of Alberta and the Università di Roma, "La Sapienza". My current research, funded by SSHRC from 2000-2004, is on "Late Prehistoric Populations of the Western Mediterranean and the Atlantic façade of Europe". This involves the extraction and analysis of ancient DNA from human skeletal remains along with other bone chemistry analyses. The collaborators include Mary Jackes, Fiona Bamforth, Henry Schwarcz and Mirjana Roksandic (Toronto) in Canada, and Pablo Arias (Santander), Nicolas Cauwe (Brussels), Eugénia Cunha (Coimbra), and José Rolão (Lisbon) in Europe.
I am presently working on a final monograph on the Algerian research (with Jackes) and an inventory of the Mesolithic and Neolithic human skeletal collections housed at the Serviços Geológicos in Lisbon (with Jackes and Meiklejohn). I am also writing a manuscript about edible land snails in circum-Mediterranean late Pleistocene and early Holocene sites. Jackes and I, in collaboration with Michael Tarabulski, hope eventually to complete a book on the 1930 Logan Museum Expedition to Algeria that will incorporate the diaries of the American students (including Sol Tax and Lauriston Ward) who taken on this first-ever overseas archaeological field school, and compare the situation then to our own work with students in Algeria in the 1970s, using archival materials including still and motion photography now housed at Beloit College, the Wisconsin State Historical Society, the University of Minnesota, the American Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian Institution.
GRADUATE DEGREES SUPERVISED
Dyck, Ian (Ph.D., 1976) The Harder Site: A Middle Period Bison Hunters' Campsite in the Northern Great Plains.
Syms, Leigh (Ph.D., 1976) Indigenous Ceramics and Ecological Dynamics of Southwestern Manitoba, 500 B.C. - A.D. 1800.
Willoughby, Pamela (M.A., 1976) An Analysis of Early Postglacial European Prehistory.
Losey, Timothy (Ph.D., 1977) Prehistoric Cultural Ecology of the Western Prairie-Forest Transition Zone, Alberta, Canada.
Sheppard, Peter (Ph.D. 1984, University of Toronto) A Study of Technological and Stylistic Variability in Capsian Stone Tool Assemblages (co-supervisor with M . Kleindienst).
Lello, Richard (M.A., 1990) Molluscs and archaeology: settlement and seasonality in the Portuguese Mesolithic.
Duarte, Cidália (M.A. 1992) Analysis of wear patterns and pathological lesions in human teeth from the Neolithic site of Grutas Artificiais do Tojal de Vila Chà (co-supervisor with O. Beattie until 1991).
MacKinnon, Michael (M.A., 1993) Analysis of animal remains from four late Roman middens at San Giovanni di Ruoti (co-supervisor with A. Small, Classics).
Fu, Yong (M.A., 1994) Dental and cranial nonmetric study of the Jiangzhai Neolithic population and its genetic affinity with other East Asians (co-supervisor with M. Jackes).
Haverkort, Caroline (Ph.D. 2001) Enamel Trace Element Composition and Palaeodietary Studies – an Exploratory Model (co-supervisor with M. Jackes).
Fowler, Kent. D. (Ph.D. 2002, committee member) Early Iron Age Community Organization in Southern Africa: Social and Symbolic Dimensions of Ceramic Production, Use, and Discard at Ndondondwane.
Kelecevic, Julija (Ph.D., co-supervisor with M. Jackes) Dental morphology of the Iron Gates Gorge Mesolithic and Neolithic populations (tentative title).
†Musacchio, Alberto (Interdepartmental Ph.D., co-supervisor with J. Hodgson, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences). Geoarchaeology of the Snake Indian River drainage basin, Jasper National Park (Alberta): a GIS approach (never completed).