News and Updates

..."Continuity and Change in Different Domains of Culture: An Emerging Approach to Understanding Diversity in Technological Traditions" by Peter Jordan, "Settlement Ecodynamics in the Prehispanic Central Mesa Verde Region" by Tim Kohler and others, "The Emergence of Inequality in Small-Scale Societies: Simple Scenarios and Agent-Banded Simulations" by Eric Smith and Jung-Kyoo Choi, and "The Spread of Farming into Central Europe and its Consequences: Evolutionary Models" by Stephen Shennan. Jordan and Shennan are affiliated with the IPEM-partnered Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity at the University College London; Kohler and Smith are IPEM faculty at WSU and UW Anthropology, respectively.

IPEM Advisory Committee Members (April 2007)

We are pleased to announce the appointment of Peter Richerson and Fraser Neiman as the external members of the IPEM Advisory Committee.

Dr. Peter Richerson is a Professor of Environmental Science and Policy, UC Davis, whose research on models of cultural evolution, social learning, and gene-culture coevolution are widely cited. Richerson’s publications (often coauthored with Robert Boyd) also analyze some of the main events in human evolution, such as evolution of  the capacity for cumulative cultural evolution,the bases of large-scale cooperation, and the origins of agriculture.
 
 Dr. Fraser Neiman is Director of the Archaeology Lab, Monticello, with appointment at the University of Virginia. His current research focuses on the archaeology of the greater Chesapeake region, from its initial settlement by Europeans and Africans to the Civil War. Evolutionary approaches to human learning, cognition, and behavior provide the theoretical inspiration for much of this empirical work, with particular focus on style, consumption, and cooperation.
 
 The IPEM Advisory Committee (AC) meets annually and has the primary role of assessing and evaluating the IPEM program and our Fellows’ progress. It is chaired by Howard Grimes, Dean of the WSU Graduate School, and also includes John Paznokas, a faculty member at WSU’s School of Biological Sciences who serves as IPEM’s Academic Outreach Coordinator, and Michael Trevisan, Director of the Assessment & Evaluation Center at WSU.
 

Award for Kohler et al. article (November 2006)

An article by IPEM director Tim Kohler and two WSU graduate students published last year in American Anthropologist (107:96-107, 2005) has been honored by the General Anthropology Division of the American Anthropological Association with its "2006 Award for Exemplary Cross Sub-Field Research." The article, entitled "Modeling Historical Ecology, Thinking about Contemporary Systems," uses agent-based simulation to estimate amounts of forest reduction by pre-Hispanic Pueblo people in Southwest Colorado, discusses the possible effects of those reductions on settlement practices, and suggests that similar tools can be used to study human/resource interactions in contemporary societies.

This is one of several articles published recently by members of the NSF-supported Village Biocomplexity Project, which has on-going research opportunities suitable for IPEM Fellow involvement.