Anthropology Department welcomes newest faculty member, Courtneay Hopper
M. Whitecotton-Carroll with files - 6 January 2025

We welcome Dr. Courtneay Hopper as our newest bioarchaeologist in the Department. We caught up with her and asked a few questions to get to know her and her work!
Could you tell us a little bit about your professional background, and what you’ve enjoyed the most about your career so far?
I am an (bio)archaeologist whose research explores the connections between environmental change, migration, human-animal interactions, and the adoption of food production in the past. My research is informed by both my anthropological and microbiological training and I integrate traditional bioarchaeological approaches (e.g., excavation, historic accounts) with biomolecular ones (e.g., ancient lipid, isotope, and protein analyses) to gain new insights into the dietary decisions of past people.
What I’ve enjoyed most about my career so far is conducting remote fieldwork (both excavations & museum collections research) and that I get to work with amazing people from a wide variety of disciplines which include, for example, molecular biology, geology, history, and chemistry.
What inspired you to enter this field?
My interest in the field started with taking ANT101 as an elective during my BSc degree. The course material really resonated with me and solidified how important it is to consider the human experience in all disciplines, not just from within the social sciences…after all who is designing, conducting, and analyzing all those experiments? From that class on, I was determined to find a way to answer anthropological questions by using my molecular biology skillset. It is this knowledge and the lab skills gained during my undergraduate training that are central to how I approach answering questions about our humanness (e.g., How healthy were we? What did we eat? Who did we interact with?). It was that ANT101 course that really inspired me initially to enter the field, but there have been many people and circumstances that have continued to inspired me.
Tell us about your research?
I am broadly interested in how past people responded to the kinds of environmental challenges we face today and how understanding these past responses can contribute to the broader discussion on human resilience in unpredictable environments. More specifically, I investigate the complex interplay between the adoption of herding by (some) foragers in north western South Africa (Namaqualand) and the accompanying social shifts related to interactions between foragers, food producers, and their environment. My doctorial research combined ceramic-bound lipid residues, archaeological excavation, faunal analysis, and ethnohistorical accounts to better recognize low-intensity herding and its diversity in the archaeological record of southern Africa.
With a better understanding for the nuances required to identify these low-intensity herders, my research is now shifting on gaining a better sense for how these herders thrived in the unpredictable environment of South Africa over the last ~2100 years. To do this, I characterize the ancient proteins preserved in ceramics which provides taxonomic specific insight into what people were putting in their ceramics (a.k.a. what they are eating). Better understanding the dietary decisions of early herding and farming communities and how their diets may have changed in response to climate change, migration, and other socioeconomic shifts provides important context for sustaining traditional low-intensity herding and farming systems today.
I also conduct fieldwork in the Namaqualand coastal desert of South Africa, where I am using more traditional archaeological methods (e.g., survey, excavation) to increase our understanding of how economic transitions occur, as well as to challenge the traditional narratives about cultural contact and the assumption that once foragers adopted herding, they could not continue, or go back to, a foraging lifeway.
Tell us about your teaching?
Teaching anthropology is really exciting because it is one of the few disciplines where students come from diverse educational backgrounds which creates a dynamic classroom and provides many unique learning opportunities. My teaching is shaped by this and I use diverse, creative, and evolving assignments that allow students to explore anthropology in a variety of ways. I always include an independent research assignment that may, for example, take the form of a traditional essay or an un-essay or creating a podcast. Since biological anthropology and archaeology are hands-on disciplines, I also try to incorporate practical scenario-based learning components such as, scaffolded weekly clues leading to the identification of an unknown hominin that culminate in creating its museum display, for instance.
In the fall 2025 term I will be teaching Introduction to Biological Anthropology as well as Human Osteoarchaeology which will focus on human health, diet, and disease in the past. In the winter 2026 term I will be teaching Hominin Evolution and new course called Domestication.
What are your impressions of Edmonton/the University of Alberta so far (if applicable)?
Edmonton is my hometown so I feel very fortunate to be able to come back to a beautiful city and a great university.
What are your hobbies, or things you like to do outside of work?
Anything outdoors really. I enjoying camping, canoeing/paddling, and have recently taken up road cycling which I am looking forward to doing more of once the warm weather returns.
Welcome to Anthropology, Courtneay, we are happy you are here!