Research Interests:
(1) Late Pleistocene
human hunting practices;
(2) The peopling of the New World;
(3) Paleoenvironments of southern Africa;
(4) Conservation and native peoples.
Financial
support for research has come from the National
Geographic Society, the Leakey Foundation, the National
Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for
Anthropological Research, the Smithsonian Institution, the
U.S. National Research Council (U.S. Academy of
Sciences), the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Polish
Academy of Sciences, the International Research and
Exchanges Board, the Fulbright Sub-Saharan Africa Senior
Researcher Program, and the Zimbabwe Parks
and Wildlife Management Authority.
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Recent
Research Activities:
As
President of INQUA's Commission on Humans and the Biosphere, I
have been developing international
cross-disciplinary research projects to study long-distance
dispersal by the genus Homo. Specifically I am interested
in the discontinuous cycles of colonization, abandonment, and
recolonization in Africa and Asia that eventually led to the
settlement of Australia and the Americas.
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My
primary fieldwork continues annually in southern Africa, where I
have been
carrying
out actualistic studie s
of elephants for a quarter century. I am also closely
collaborating with African scientists to learn more about the
changing Pleistocene-Holocene paleoenvironments of northwestern
Zimbabwe and the complexities of human prehistory in that part
of the continent. In 2008 and 2009, I excavated rockshelters
in Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe. Analyses are in early stages.
Many results will be posted on
this website and also presented at conferences and submitted as
papers to
refereed journals.
Downloadable Data: Hwange
handaxe measurements (MsExcel©
file of metrics and MsWord© file of metric codes);
List of Spoor Engravings in Zimbabwe
(PDF file); Spreadsheet of
Bumbusi Ridge Engravings (MsExcel©
file); Tables to Determine Age of Elephants (PDF
file); Graphic of OSL dates from a Kalahari Dune Crest (PDF
file); Tables of Archeological Survey Work in Hwange
National Park, Zimbabwe (PDF
file); List of Archeological Sites Found in Hwange National
Park (PDF file); Graph and
Table of Animals That Have Died at Four Seepage Springs in
Hwange National Park (MHT
file).
I
have also been involved for over 30 years in studies of Clovis-era megafauna, the enigmatic end-Pleistocene extinctions, the wide
variability to be found in archeological assemblages, and the
complex paleoenvironmental changes of the Late Glacial interval.
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