Eastern North America
program description
Eastern North America is one of several regions of the ancient world where a complete sequence is found from mobile hunter-gatherer societies to agriculturally based chiefdoms. Few parts of the world have as much excavated archaeological and osteological material. As a result, Eastern North America provides unique opportunities to investigate long-term population trends and movement, the transition to agriculture, and the origins of sociopolitical complexity.
research emphasis
Geographical: Eastern Woodlands and Caribbean: from the Great Lakes to the Gulf, and the Atlantic to the Mississippi, Gulf Coast and Mesoamerica.
Cultural: Paleoindians to settled hunter-gatherers and village agriculturists, especially late prehistoric tribal confederacies in the Northeast and chiefdoms in the Midwest, Southeast, and Caribbean.
Topical: The North American program emphasizes an integrated approach to demography and health, long-term population trends, subsistence and environment, human land use, and settlement patterns. Topics of research include, among others, the origins of plant domestication, the creation of intensively human-modified environments, and the impact of new ways of life on human population dynamics, health, and interaction (including warfare).
Training: Emphasis is placed on the unified study of human, animal, and plant remains, along with accompanying cultural materials. It includes the application of geospatial information systems (GIS) to explain long-term patterns of natural and cultural landscape use. Faculty provide intensive training in human osteology and paleoethnobotany in fully equipped labs, and students have access to state-of-the-art computer facilities, including GIS, digital imaging, database management, and other cybertools.
Broad Background: A broad background is essential for a well-rounded anthropologist, and at Penn State students can take advantage of the North American faculty’s experience in Denmark, Egypt, and the Mariana Islands in western Oceania (Milner); Mesoamerica (Snow and Newsom); and Amazonia (Newsom). Other archaeology faculty have personal experience in Central and South America, and elsewhere in the world.
Mesoamerican Faculty in Other Departments
Timothy Murtha, Asst Professor, Landscape Architecture, GIS visualization, The Maya
Matthew Restall, Associate Professor, Dept of History, Ethnohistory, The Maya
department anthropologists
George R. Milner, Ph.D., Professor of Anthropology (ost@psu.edu): Eastern North America (Midwest and Southeast, Archaic, Mississippian), settlement patterns, land use, human osteology (paleodemography, paleopathology)
Claire McHale Milner, Ph.D., Director of Exhibits and Museum Curator (cmm8@psu.edu): Eastern North America (Great Lakes and Northeast); ceramic studies; museum studies
Lee Newsom, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Anthropology (lan12@psu.edu): Eastern North America (Gulf Coast), Caribbean, Amazonia, paleoethnobotany, plant domestication, human-environment interactions as adaptive systems, long-term change in environmental systems
Dean R. Snow, Ph.D., Professor of Anthropology (drs17@psu.edu): Eastern North America (Northeast, Iroquois), settlement patterns, paleodemography, archaeoinformatics
departmental facilities and field school
Students regularly participate in laboratory and field-based research on individual projects and in shared facilities such as the department's Geographic Information System (GIS) facility.
Bioarchaeology: For analyses of human skeletal remains and archaeological materials from the American Midwest and Southeast.
GIS Facility: For computer-based spatial analyses of cultural and ecological data.
Mesoamerica: For analyses of lithic technology, use wear, petrographics, and spatial analysis (GIS)
Copan archaeology: For analysis of a huge spatial data base acquired since 1980.
North America: For analyses of archaeological materials from the American Northeast.
Paleoethnobotany: For analyses of plant remains in various preservation states and forms, with emphasis on the Neotropics and southeastern North America
Matson Museum: For training in collections management and exhibit design
Other University Facilities and Programs
Breazeale Nuclear Reactor
Center for Quantitative Imaging
Forensic Science Program
Institutes of the Environment
Materials Research Institute
courses
ANTH 423 The Evolution of American Indian Culture
ANTH 545 Seminar in Archaeology: Structure of Late Prehistoric Societies
graduate application and undergraduate Registration information
links
Population Research Institute
Anthropology/Demography Dual-Degree Program
