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Marcus John Hamilton
B.Sc., M.S., Ph.D.
NSF Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Biology
and
Adjunct Professor
Department of Anthropology
University of New Mexico
Albuquerque
New Mexico, 87131
USA
I have broad interests in anthropology, archaeology, ecology, evolution and quantitative methods drawn together in the broader fields of macroecology and complexity science. I am particularly interested in three general research topics: 1) the ecology and evolution of human-environment interactions through time and space, both in terms of the feedbacks between complex human and ecological systems, and the resulting emergent patterns of human biocultural diversity we see in the world around us; 2) comparative studies of macroecological variation across human cultures and across biological species; and 3) hunter-gatherer archaeology and ecology, particularly Paleoindian North America, the late Pleistocene global expansion of modern humans, and the behavioral ecology of foragers. My research emphasizes the development of formal quantitative theory and data analysis in equal parts.
Current Research Projects
1) I recently began a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Biology, UNM, funded by an NSF Research Collaboration Network grant (DEB 0541625) to Felisa Smith (UNM), Kate Lyons (Smithsonian) and Morgan Ernest (Utah State), titled Integrative Macroecological Pattern and Process across Scales (IMPPS). I will be pursuing comparative studies of life history variation across taxa in collaboration with James H. Brown (UNM) and Richard S. Sibly (Reading), as well as participating in ongoing projects funded by the grant including patterns of human caused extinctions through time.
2) I am collaborating with James H. Brown, Rob Walker (Missouri), Oskar Burger (UNM/SWCA) and others on broad scale questions of human macroecology, including energy use and information flows in human systems, the ecology and evolution of human cultural diversity, and human life history evolution. Much of this research focuses on the application of the metabolic theory of ecology to understanding key aspects of human ecology and evolution from a unified theoretical framework.
3) I am conducting ongoing research with Bruce Huckell (UNM) and Vance T. Holliday (Arizona) into the Paleoindian archaeology and paleoecology of the Central Rio Grande Rift Valley. This research involves interdisciplinary collaborations with researchers across the US (i.e., M. Steven Shackley, UC Berkeley; Dan Amick, Loyola; Matt E. Hill, Iowa), and focuses on excavations at the Mockingbird Gap Clovis site, New Mexico, analysis of public and privately-held artifact collections, large-scale regional surveys, raw material sourcing, and paleoenvironmental reconstruction. We are primarily interested in hunter-gatherer land-use strategies and responses to climate change at the late Pleistocene/early Holocene transition.
4) Briggs Buchanan (Simon Fraser) and I are researching a broad array of topics concerning the early Paleoindian archaeological record of North America, the cultural transmission of lithic technology, and the initial colonization of the Americas during the late Pleistocene. Our general approach is to formalize research questions (which are often somewhat vague in Paleoindian archaeology), by deriving quantitative hypotheses, which are then tested by compiling and analyzing available data using a variety of quantitative techniques, including diffusion processes, morphometrics and cladistics. Projects to date have included the Clovis expansion in North America, the evolution of Clovis projectile point technology, continental variation in Clovis techology, the nature of the Clovis/Folsom transition, and the timing of the expansion of modern humans across Northeastern Asia and into Beringia. Please see Publications above.
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