Our researchers
Rowland Apentiik
Rowland Apentiik's research and teaching interests lie in the areas of comparative community development; environmental and human resource management; ethnoecology; anthropological theory and methods. Much of Apentiik's research focuses on how indigenous communities engage with specific natural and social-cultural, economic and political environments, as they negotiate their survival in the unfolding context of globalization and its local manifestations. The principal aim of much of his research is to draw the attention of policy makers and agents of development to the significance of local cultural values, systems of thought, mythologies and traditions, perceptions, politics, and histories as critical considerations in the design and implementation of efficacious development projects and programs. Specifically, Apentiik's research interrogates and evaluates both conventional as well as alternative approaches to development, and provides some directions on how to recognize and respond to local stakeholders, cultural gaps, and differences in knowledge systems in development interventions.
Susanne Cote
Susanne Cote is a biological anthropologist and leader of the University of Calgary’s Primate Paleobiology Lab. Her research group studies the fossil evidence for ape, monkey, and human evolution, primarily based in East Africa. The primary focus of research is to understand how environmental pressures have shaped the adaptations of early apes and monkeys in East Africa by studying the primate fossils themselves, other mammalian fossils found in association with primates, and other paleoecological proxies. Current fieldwork takes place in northeastern Uganda and the Turkana Basin in Kenya.
Peter Dawson
Peter Dawson is a full Professor and is the Head of the Department. His research focuses on the digital preservation of heritage sites in Alberta and the Canadian Arctic. He and his graduate students use reality capture technologies such as terrestrial and aerial laser scanning to document, archive, analyse, and preserve heritage resources that are at risk, due to the impacts of climate change and human-caused destruction. His group works with an interdisciplinary team of researchers in such areas as geomatics engineering, computer science, and art. Together they explore how technologies like virtual reality can be used to mobilise knowledge about heritage sites, especially those that are inaccessible to the public because they are too remote or dangerous to visit. Dawson have partnered with Alberta Culture and Tourism, Parks Canada, and the Virtual Museum of Canada on a variety of digital heritage projects and virtual exhibits.
Naotaka Hayashi
Naotaka Hayashi's main research interest focusses on the relationships between humans and the environment in which they live. State of the environment, including physical features, weather, flora and fauna, is dynamic, such that inhabitants' relationship to their environment never remain static. Hayashi has been doing research in Greenland on how local residents have acquired and built knowledge and skills to live off ever-shifting environments. For example, he is investigating sheep farming in South Greenland and sea-mammal hunting in North and East Greenland to unfold how local residents adjust and develop their understanding of the environment, while coping with changing climatic variability and conditions. More recently, Hayashi has been interested in how people form and shape a future vision of happiness, hope, or well-being through their human-environment relationship.
Christopher Holdsworth
Christopher Holdsworth's research interests focuses on the history and philosophy of Anthropology. He is also interested in the impact culture has on business, especially understanding corporate culture, the role culture has on consumers, and how culture impacts multinational corporations and conducting business internationally. Another area of interest is the history of indigenous-non-indigenous relations in Canada. COurse Holdsworth teaches are Business Anthropology, the History of Anthropology, Contemporary Aboriginal Issues, Economic Anthropology, the Anthropology of Religion, and introduction to Anthropology. In 2017 Holdsworth published An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology: An Applied Perspective. He is also currently the undergraduate program director for the department and work on developing the course offerings by the Department.
Steig Johnson
Steig Johnson's research career in Madagascar began in 1995, where he has conducted research on lemur behaviour, ecology, and population biology across the southeastern rain forests. Study systems of interest include lemur communities in forests impacted by fragmentation and cyclones, as well as a brown lemur hybrid zone. Johnson is especially interested in multi-scale approaches with the potential to link proximate ecological and broader evolutionary processes.
Jennifer Leason
Jennifer Leason Keesis Sagay Egette Ekwé (First Shining Rays of Sunlight Woman) is a Saulteaux-Métis Anishinaabek Kwé (woman) and mother of Lucas (age 8) and Lucy (age 5). Jennifer is of mixed ancestry and her Indigenous roots are from Duck Bay, Pine Creek First Nation and Camperville, Manitoba. She is grateful to the First peoples and communities of Treaty 7 and Métis Nation Alberta, Region III in which the University of Calgary is situated. Dr. Leason's research interests are Canadian and International Indigenous people’s health, with a focus on Indigenous maternal-child and reproductive health. She is a community-based researcher who uses mixed methods, including Indigenous theory and methods.
Diane Lyons
Diane Lyons conducts ethnoarchaeological research in Africa that focuses on how social identities are constituted in vernacular architecture, community and household spaces, culinary practice and in the material objects of everyday life. Her current research examines how social perceptions of marginalized potters in northern highland Ethiopia effects pottery production, consumption and distribution.
Charles Mather
Currently, I am intent on building a research program that will focus upon the relationship between environmental change and traditional systems of ecological management in Northern Ghana. I am interested in the resilience of traditional institutions centred on shrine rituals and material culture. I am a member of the UofC QES-WAS research team in the Faculty of Arts. We were recently awarded funding to carry out a multiyear project linking with faculty at the University of Legon, in Ghana. I will build my project via collaboration with faculty at the University of Legon. I will be on research leave from July 2021 until July 2022. Upon my return, I will be seeking graduate students whose interests align with the research focus I outlined above.
Geoffrey McCafferty
Geoffrey McCafferty's current research employs archaeological, ethnohistorical, and art historical perspectives to interpret the cultural processes involved in ethnic change during the Bagaces and Sapoa periods in Pacific Nicaragua, when historical accounts claim close affiliation with Mesoamerican groups from central Mexico. This research supplements continuing investigations into cultural identity in Postclassic Cholula and Oaxaca. A third research theme involves the archaeological interpretation of gender relations in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica.
Mary MacDonald
As a prehistoric archaeologist, the overall theme Mary MacDonald has pursued is the Origins of Agriculture. Initially she investigated the topic in the Near East (Western Iran, Southeast Turkey), more recently, in Northeastern Africa (Dakhleh and Kharga Oases in the Egyptian Western Desert). Topics of interest include the nature and timing of the Neolithic in the oases; adaptations to an arid environment, particularly as revealed in site distribution and the chipped stone industry; evidence for increased sedentism and social complexity; and origins of the Egyptian civilization.
Ben McKay
Ben McKay's research interests include the politics of agrarian change in Latin America, food sovereignty alternatives, the extractive character of capitalist agricultural development, the global food system, flex crops, and the rise of emerging economies and their implications for global agrarian transformation. McKay has carried out research and maintains research interests in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela. He is a Fellow at the University of Calgary’s Latin American Research Centre and a Research Associate and part of the Global Secretariat of the BRICS Initiative for Critical Agrarian Studies (BICAS).
Amanda Melin
Amanda Melin addresses key areas of debate concerning the adaptive radiation of primates, including humans. In particular, she asks how primates: 1) use their senses to locate and select foods; and 2) adapt to environmental shifts in resource abundance through diet, behaviour, and symbiosis with microbial communities. By evaluating variation between and within species, she will ask how natural selection shapes the evolution of sensory systems and foraging ecology. Her work unites molecular genetics and genomics, stable isotope analysis, behavioural ecology fieldwork, and computational models of animal vision.
Julio Mercader
Julio Mercader Florín is a professor at the University of Calgary and the principal investigator of the SSHRC-funded project Stone Tools, Diet and Sociality. His current research focuses on human evolution, with specific regard to dietary and climatic change and how this impacted human evolution, with an emphasis on tropical ecosystems during the African Stone age. Dr. Mercader's research methods entail a multidisciplinary assessment of subsistence, diet, technology stability and change, as well as paleoenvironments. His current research is conducted at the UNESCO World Heritage site of Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. Over the years, he has also studied a diversity of archaeological sites in Central, West, and Southern Africa. Dr. Mercader has overseen field and laboratory work in multiple contexts, ranging from undergraduate field schools to highly technical laboratory set-ups. Dr. Mercader is also a research associate with the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany, The Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES) in Spain, and the Department of Geoscience at the University of Calgary. In addition to this, he is a former Canada Research Chair in Tropical Archaeology.
Maribeth Murray
Maribeth Murray is a human ecologist and archaeologist with interests in climate/ecosystem/human interactions. Her research is focused on the human dimensions of climate change, and human and marine system dynamics in the Arctic and sub-Arctic. Her work emphasizes the integration of anthropological, climatological, historical, oceanographical, ecological, toxicological datasets to better understand how the Arctic functions as a system with people integral to that system. Current research activities include the development of a citizen-science program for marine observing, the development of polar climate change education tools for adults, and the analysis of climate impacts in a rapidly changing north, including the response of the research community to new challenges.
Gerald Oetelaar
A graduate of Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, Gerald Oetelaar’s current research interests focus on landscape evolution, and human perceptions of the landscape. To explore the evolution of the geomorphological environment on the northwestern Plains, he depends primarily on the western scientific approach. However, when trying to understand human perceptions and uses of the landscape, he relies on the phenomenological approach which involves using alternate worldviews, namely those of First Nations, to interpret the archaeological record of the Northwestern Plains. The decision to employ such complementary approaches has generated new avenues of research such as the roles of humans in the management of ‘natural’ resources throughout the Holocene. Earlier in his academic career, Oetelaar analyzed the morphological and histological attributes of animal bones as indicators of age, sex, weight and season of death and developed a model for the organization of rural agricultural communities in Mississippian societies of the Eastern Woodlands.
Elizabeth Paris
Elizabeth Paris is a Mesoamerican archaeologist with a focus on the Maya civilization. She researches the archaeology of urbanism, particularly urban commercial networks, the organization of market neighborhoods, and the manipulation of high-value commodities. Methodological specialties include archaeometallurgy, lithic analysis, zooarchaeology, and compositional analysis. Her research projects in highland Chiapas explore the influence of exotic, high-value goods on household economic organization among the hilltop kingdoms of the Jovel Valley (San Cristóbal region, Chiapas, Mexico), and the sociopolitical relationships between these kingdoms. Projects at Mayapan, Yucatan, Mexico, investigate the role of sub-royal elites in interregional exchange networks and luxury craft industries, focusing particularly on metalworking activities.
Mary Pavelka
Mary Pavelka is a biological anthropologist with interests in the evolution of menopause, the social dynamics of nonhuman primates, and the effects of hurricanes on primate populations and forests. She focused for many years on the terrestrial omnivorous female-bonded Japanese monkeys of Arashiyama West, before switching to arboreal folivorous non-female bonded black howler monkeys of Monkey River, Belize. More recently, her research efforts have targeted the fission-fusion dynamics of black handed spider monkeys in Belize.
Sabrina Peric
Sabrina Peric is an historical anthropologist whose research focuses on radical politics. Whether studying ethnonationalists, racial supremacists, or Communist militants, her research seeks to understand how people accept new or extremist ideas, how they act in broader society, and why some of their actions manifest in violence. More specifically, all of her research is situated in extractive centres (oil and mining) and focuses on the role that extractive economic activity plays in fostering political agitation. She is currently the PI for a SSHRC-funded project studying the role of cultural mechanisms – such as literacy programs and reading circles – in fostering the spread of Communist politics amongst industrial workers in southeastern Europe in the 1930s and 40s. She is also a Fellow at the Calgary Institute for the Humanities for 2017-2018, and a convenor of the ‘Energy in Society’ research group in the Faculty of Arts.
Kathryn Reese-Taylor
Kathryn Reese-Taylor is interested in the development of complexity, early sedentary communities and agricultural adaptations, archaeology of urbanism, landscape archaeology, and spatial analysis. She has directed several projects in the Maya region at important sites, such as Naachtun in Peten, Guatemala, and is currently the director of the Yaxnohcah Environmental and Archaeological Research Project in the southern Campeche, Mexico. The project focuses on environmental changes, human-environment interaction, and the development of urbanism in the Maya lowlands.
Vivek Venkataraman
Vivek Venkataraman studies the ecological context of human evolution through field studies of human and nonhuman primates. His particular focus is on foraging behaviour, energetics, locomotion, and life history. He is the co-founder and co-director of the Orang Asli Health and Lifeways Project (OAHeLP), a systematic and comparative study of biology, health, behaviour, and culture among the Orang Asli, the indigenous peoples of Peninsular Malaysia. The current research foci of OAHeLP is the rise of chronic non-infectious diseases over time due to rapidly changing environments. He is also co-director of the Guassa Gelada Research Project a long-term study in northern Ethiopia of the behaviour and ecology of the grass-eating specialist gelada monkey (Theropithecus gelada). Dr. Venkataraman combines in-depth study of the foraging behaviour of geladas with analysis of fossils to shed light on the evolution of the grazing niche in primates.
Matthew Walls
Matthew Walls studies the deep history of community-environment relationships, and how people come to perceive and act together in a world that is always in flux. His work produces theory on the role of creativity in long term process, and focuses on questions that address the ecology of knowledge, how it is constructed and attuned between generations, and the dynamics of practice-based communities through time. His research projects explore these topics within hunter-gatherer communities and he directs archaeological and ethnographic fieldwork in Greenland and Czech Republic.
Warren Wilson
Warren Wilson is a biological anthropologist who studies the health of people in developing countries. In doing so, he considers health in light of physiology, culture, and evolution. His early work focused on children in urban Colombia, Amerindians in both the Colombian Amazon and Guyana’s rainforests, and refugees in Canada. More recently, he has conducted work in Tanzania and Nicaragua to document health and its predictors among mothers and their children. This research considers the relationship between an array of predictors (e.g. food insecurity, social capital, sociodemographics) and a model that captures the cumulative impact of environmental challenges on overall health (allostatic load). The immediate outcome of these projects is the identification of barriers to maternal and child health in these regions, with the long-term goal of informing locally-relevant, public health measures.
Saulesh Yessenova
Saulesh Yessenova is a sociocultural anthropologist interested in energy transition, the Cold War situation, international spectacles and infrastructures supporting energy markets and innovation. Yessenova was brought up in Kazakhstan, then part of the USSR. Her academic career as an anthropologist has brought Yessenova to Canada, but she still focuses on Kazakhstan for her research and writing.