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marcus hamilton

Marcus J. Hamilton, B.Sc., M.S.


Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Anthropology
University of New Mexico
Albuquerque
New Mexico, 87131
USA

I have broad interests in anthropology, ecology, evolutionary theory, and quantitative methods drawn together in a broader discipline my collaborators and I call human macroecology . Fundamentally I see all human systems as integrally embedded within complex ecosystems, systems that are made up of the flows of energy, information and matter between organisms and their environments. The story of human biological and cultural evolution has been about how the human species has accessed ever more complex and powerful forms of energy under the various selective constraints imposed by the human life history, evolutionary processes, and the heterogeneity of fitness-related resources and information in the environment. Key to understanding this interplay is that human systems are self-organized complex adaptive systems constantly interacting and adapting to their environments in non-linear ways. As a science, I see one of the core goals of anthropology to develop a general body of quantitative theory that can be used to address different aspects of human biological and cultural diversity from a unified framework.

Black-tailed Prairie Dog

Current Research

I am currently completing my Ph.D. dissertation on the spatiotemporal variation of the archaeology and paleocology of the North American Late Plesitocene Clovis culture (see Publications), under the joint advisorship of Dr. Bruce B. Huckell, and Dr. James L. Boone at the University of New Mexico. My field research focuses on the archaeology and paleoecology of the Mockingbird Gap Clovis site, Socorro County, New Mexico, in collaboration with Drs. Bruce B. Huckell, Robert Weber (retired), and Vance T. Holliday, University of Arizona.

I am also conducting research in Human Macroecology in collaboration with Dr. James H. Brown, and others at the Department of Biology at UNM. So far we have focused on applications of metabolic scaling theory to hunter-gatherer space use and ecology (see Publications). We are now extending this research to develop a quantitative theory of human energy, information, and resource use that we hope will provide a general theoretical framework to explore human biological and cultural diversity through time and space.

 

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