Kurt Rademaker
Texas A&M University-College Station, TX·Social Science
How did small groups of hunter-gatherers survive for thousands of years in harsh high-mountain environments, long before herding, farming or cities existed? Archaeology can answer this by showing how people coped as climates and landscapes changed.
- Fields
Social Science
Earth & Environmental Science
Ecology & Evolution
- Topics
archaeology
hunter-gatherers
foragers
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- 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.
- Compare occupation records with local paleoenvironmental (past environment) records to test whether specific environmental changes affected when and how people lived at high altitude.
- Analyze artifacts and plant and animal remains to reconstruct changes in diet, mobility, technology, resource use and links between ecological zones. Test whether these shifts coincided with environmental change.
More about the research
These lessons help explain how human adaptability developed and how today's inhabited landscapes took shape.
Why it matters
Long-term records of how foraging societies persisted through environmental change in high mountains can show how small-scale communities withstand difficult conditions. This could inform how we think about human resilience to environmental shifts. Local communities near the sites also benefit through educational materials about their archaeological heritage.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Justin Pargeter
New York University, NY·Social Science
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.
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.
Elizabeth Minor
California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo, CA·Social Science
Reconstruct how an ancient community adjusted agriculture, animal husbandry, craft production and trade as water resources declined, using settlement archaeology and analysis of plant and animal remains.
The school
Texas A&M University-College Station: 23 labs on PI Pages, $1.4B a year on research, 768 research doctorates a year.
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