Achievement

IPEM training has led Erik Gjesfjeld to incorporate phylogentic and social network modeling into his dissertation research. This work will contribute to transformative change in how archaeologists think about the kinds of questions that can be answered with archaeological data and will help archaeologists to engage more directly with scholars in other social and natural sciences such as socio-cultural anthropology, human geography, sociology, history, and it opens possibilities for cross-disciplinary analyses in climate and environmental sciences as they provide possible mechanisms for changes in cultural evolution and social processes. For foragers in the isolated Kuril Islands Gjesfjeld discovered high resilience to fluctuations in their local natural environments yet high susceptibility to non-local changes in the cultural environment, challenging the archaeological conception that social networks are always highly beneficial for isolated foraging populations.