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Anthropology Colloquium with Archaeologist and Neukom Fellow Dr. Paige Paulsen

Thursday, Nov. 6th - 12:15pm
Haldeman 031

Desert Landscapes: The Archaeology of Thriving in Arid Environments 
Deserts and drylands cover approximately 40% of the Earth’s land area and pose distinct opportunities and challenges to human occupation and to archaeological study. Archaeology is foundational to understanding the development of these environments over time as well as the changing and variable ways that humans interact with them. I study past human occupation in arid environments, primarily Southeast Arabia, using a suite of landscape archaeological methods, including regional survey, remote sensing, and computational modeling to understand how people have lived within and moved through these environments. I use survey and remote sensing methods well-suited to arid environments, such as thermal imagery, to document and describe archaeological features in the landscape and computational modeling to describe landscapes’ movement potential. These approaches help us understand the variable ways past people have thrived in desert and dryland environments.