Kurt Wilson (he/him/his)

I am an anthropological archaeologist who is interested understanding human-environment interactions during climatic change with a particular focus on how human behaviors and local ecologies influence dietary change, inequality, territoriality, cooperation, and defense. I teach courses on archaeology, sustainability, using statistics to understand human behavior, climate change, and world prehistory and am the advisor to the Lawrence University Anthropology Society. For my research, I work in the Central Andes, particularly Perú, and western North America where I apply multiple methods to ethnographic, palaeoecological, and archaeological data. I particularly enjoy working with students across these contexts as they investigate their own questions and interests.

Ongoing Projects with Student Opportunities

1) Human-environment Interactions, Egalitarianism, and Inequality in western North America and the Central Andes.

We are exploring how local environments, and variation and change within them, impacts both the trajectory of inequality and inequality’s interaction with other behaviors using ethnographic records, agent-based model simulation, approximate bayesian computation, machine learning, and archaeological household, dietary, and population data. Centered in western North America, we are exploring in particular how climate and population change incentivized adoption of agriculture and its consequences for population growth and the emergence and exacerbation of inequality. 

2) Climate Change, Intensification, and Complexity

We are also exploring how human subsistence economic decisions in response to climate change have altered social organizations, interacted with sociopolitical complexity, and influenced peace and violence. Employing machine learning, paleo-environmental reconstruction, population density estimates, dietary isotope values spanning the past 7,000 years, osteological markers of stress and trauma, and fieldwork we are looking at both coastal and highland patterns of human-environment interactions in the Central Andes.

Ongoing and Recent Grants

Submitting. National Science Foundation Human-Environment and Geographical Sciences Program (HEGS) National Science Foundation, HEGS. “Scaling the Central Andes (SCA): Multi-scalar adaptation and resilience to climate change using artificial intelligence driven downscaling in the Central Andes”. Co-PIs: Daniel A. Contreras, Nicholas Gauthier, John Krigbaum, Kurt Wilson

2024- Research Incentive Seed Grant Program. University of Utah, Vice President for Research. “Isotopes, Salvage Archaeology, and Complexity (ISAC):
Exploring the Human-Environment Interactions of Everyday People During the Rise and Fall of Complex Civilizations on Peru’s North Coast”. Co-PIs: Kurt M. Wilson, Weston C. McCool, Joan Brenner Coltrain

2022-24 National Science Foundation SBE Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (NSF-SMA #2203767). National Science Foundation, Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE). “Socioecological System Dynamics and the Emergence of Inequality: Evaluating the Impacts of Climate
Change, Demography, and Privatization”. Kurt M. Wilson (PI), Simon C. Brewer (Co-PI)

For more see:

Curriculum vitae