|
My research focuses on the evolution of human social
life and the cognitive capacities that underpin complex social interactions.
How and why were humans able to scale up their social lives from the very
small social groups we lived in for much of our prehistory to the global
social networks which characterise people’s lives today? My work takes
a multidisciplinary perspective which emphasises the interrelations between
the physical and social environments in which human evolution has taken
place, and I am particularly interested in the role played by material
culture in human social life. Within this broad area I work on two interlinked areas
of research which focus on earlier and later periods of human social
development. In the first I look at the relationship between physical and
social environments during human evolution. I use a variety of techniques
including GIS and agent-based modelling to investigate how interactions
between humans, other animals, plants, landscapes and material culture
affected hominin life history and social structure, and how this in turn
impacted on the evolution of the human brain, life histories and cultural
innovation and transmission. Much of my work in this area has developed from
my work as a member of the British Academy Centenary Project ‘From Lucy to Language: the archaeology
of the Social Brain’. My second area of research focuses on the social and
material culture developments which formed part of the shift from mobile
hunting and gathering to settled village life, which occurred from around
20,000BCE in the Near East. In this work I use techniques derived from social
network analysis to investigate changes in material culture distribution as a
proxy for social relations during the transition from mobile hunting and
gathering to settled village life in the Epipalaeolithic
and early Neolithic of the Near East. As a founding member of ‘The Connected
Past’ group (http://connectedpast.soton.ac.uk), I am working alongside colleagues from
archaeology, history and network science to develop network science methods
for use with archaeological and historical datasets. Both areas of research are combined in the AHRC/Xuan
Truong Enterprise-funded SUNDASIA Project,
of which I am a co-investigator. This project explores how prehistoric
tropical communities adapted to palaeoenvironmental
change, especially cycles of coastal inundation, over the last 60,000 years
in the Tràng An
landscape complex World Heritage Site, Ninh Binh, Vietnam. How does environmental change relate to
social interaction and material culture production, use and exchange among
and between groups at the time, and how do these developments compare to
those occurring in the Near East in regard to the adoption of sedentism and agriculture? Most crucially, how might
these data help models of and the development of responses to modern climate-induced
seas-level rise in the region? |
Follow me on Twitter: @BU_BAArchAnth Follow the SUNDASIA Project on
Twitter: @SUNDASIAProject |
RESEARCH & EMPLOYMENT PUBLICATIONS CONFERENCES/WORKSHOPS |