Justin Pargeter
New York University, NY·Social Science
How did reliable, concentrated food sources shape human behavior long before farming? Archaeologists have long linked agriculture to settled life, better technology, and social inequality.
- Fields
Social Science
Ecology & Evolution
- Topics
archaeology
anthropology
human evolution
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Mar 2027
What they work on
- Track how hunter-gatherers made, maintained, and repaired stone tools before and during a shift toward eating more fish and shellfish, using stone tool collections from two sites spanning the past 5,000 years.
- Test whether aquatic food intensification changed which raw stone materials people chose and where they got them, comparing tool assemblages from two contrasting environments.
- Infer whether greater reliance on marine and freshwater foods altered hunter-gatherer mobility, using tool production and sourcing patterns as evidence of how often groups moved.
- Build a shared database of archaeological data on aquatic resource exploitation to support comparative studies of hunter-gatherer adaptation.
More about the research
Newer evidence suggests some of these changes came earlier. Fish and shellfish are one likely earlier source of dependable food. Learning how they changed hunter-gatherer life could help explain when and why these key human adaptations first appeared.
Why it matters
Billions of people today depend on dense, predictable food sources such as crops. This work could clarify how such resources first reshaped human technology, settlement, and social organization, using fish and shellfish as an earlier case. Its open database on aquatic resource use could serve archaeologists and educators studying how people respond to changing resources and environments.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Francois Lanoe
University of Arkansas, AR·Social Science
Reconstruct subsistence economies at Broken Mammoth over time, including diet breadth and seasonal land use, through zooarchaeological analysis of the site's large animal bone collection.
Kurt Rademaker
Texas A&M University-College Station, TX·Social Science
Build high-resolution radiocarbon chronologies at the earliest and longest-occupied high-altitude sites to determine when people first settled the region and whether occupation was continuous or broken.
Leslie Reeder-Myers
Temple University, PA·Social Science
Test whether sharp drops in an ancient mangrove fishery's productivity were driven by lagoon ecology, political organization or nearby farming, using excavations and sediment cores across two millennia.
The school
New York University: 72 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 540 research doctorates a year.
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