Research Projects in the Department of Archaeology

Displaying 2 projects
(-) Americas
(-) Current Projects

Redressing Extinction: Using Environmental Archaeology to Trace the Mode and Tempo of Afro-Indigenous Creolization in the Caribbean

This project investigates when Afro-Indigenous societies emerged in the Caribbean and how the tempo and mode of Creolization varied across ecological and colonial contexts? This inquiry is grounded in environmental archaeology and focuses on the Caribbean—particularly Puerto Rico—as a space of Indigenous-African-European encounters and transformations. The project challenges prevailing narratives of Taíno extinction by investigating the material and ecological traces of Indigenous persistence and Afro-Indigenous ethnogenesis from 1450 to 1815 AD.

REVERSEACTION: Reverse engineering collective action: complex technologies in stateless societies

Cooperation is a markedly human mix of innate and learned behaviour, and a key to tackling some of our greatest concerns. Paradoxically, studies of social dynamics often focus on hierarchies, state formation and political structures ruled by coercive power, with comparatively little regard to the mechanisms whereby humans voluntarily collaborate. Encouragingly, new research on collective action is reconciling classic anthropology with game theory and empirical studies of group resource management, thus heralding a fundamental transformation.

Research Projects in the Department of Archaeology

Redressing Extinction: Using Environmental Archaeology to Trace the Mode and Tempo of Afro-Indigenous Creolization in the Caribbean

REVERSEACTION: Reverse engineering collective action: complex technologies in stateless societies

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