Ecological and Environmental Anthropology at UCSB

UCSB’s Department of Anthropology offers a dynamic research community in Ecological and Environmental Anthropology.  Approaches span archaeological, biological and sociocultural subdisciplines, and include political ecology, cultural ecology, behavioral ecology/evolutionary ecology, environmental anthropology, maritime and coastal anthropology, forager ecology, health and ecology, and demography.  Faculty research encompasses the full range of human societies past and present, including foragers and small-scale societies, developing societies, indigenous peoples, middle range societies, and states (ancient and modern).

Faculty:

Shankar Aswani (Associate Professor):

Steven Gaulin (Professor): Gaulin is a biosocial anthropologist presently specializing in evolutionary psychology but originally trained as a primate behavioral ecologist.  He studies a wide range of adaptations that have been shaped by sexual selection, from spatial cognition to fat metabolism.  His continuing interest in ecology is motivated by a desire to parse the selective environments and facultative triggers that explain the form and occurrence of these adaptations. 

Michael Glassow (Professor): Glassow studies subsistence change and population fluctuation among prehistoric hunter-gatherer-fishers of the Santa Barbara Channel region of California.  He is particularly interested in responses to climatic changes that affected marine resource productivity during the period between 7000 and 4000 years ago.

Michael Gurven (Associate Professor): A behavioral ecologist with strong interests in the evolutionary basis of social behavior, such as cooperation and risk management, and life histories among hunter-gatherers and small-scale farmers. He is currently focused on explaining differences in life span, development and aging between people living more traditional and modern market-based lifestyles. An ecological framework is critical for grounding hypotheses about behavioral or morphological adaptations. Fieldwork is based in the Bolivian Amazon.

Michael Jochim (Professor): Archaeologist Jochim is interested in the ecology of hunter-gatherers, both past and present.  He teaches courses in human ecology, modern hunter-gatherers and European prehistory.  His fieldwork focuses on the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic of Germany, and examines the processes by which hunter-gatherers adapted to the environmental changes at the end of the last ice age.

Juan-Vicente Palerm (Professor):

Katharina Schreiber (Professor): Archaeologist Schreiber focuses on cultural adaptations to desert and high altitude environments in the Andean region of South America.  She is interested in the ways in which expanding empires reorganized local populations in order to exploit particular ecological niches.  Her studies of large-scale irrigation systems in the coastal desert document the ways in which ancient people manipulated their environment to increase agricultural production.  She also addresses the ways in which ancient people attached meaning and significance to places on the landscape.

Susan Stonich (Professor):

John Tooby (Professor): Tooby is interested in the cultural and behavioral ecology of hunter-gatherers and forager-horticulturalists, past and present. Much of his research focuses on how the decision-making mechanisms that are built into universal human nature (and that pattern culture) evolved to exploit, mesh with, and operate successfully within the long-term ecological structure of the world.

Phillip Walker (Professor): A biological anthropologist interested in the ecological correlates of health, disease, and patterns of interpersonal violence in earlier human societies. Through the use of bioarchaeological methods, he and his colleagues are studying the history of the health of human populations from the Paleolithic period to recent times from a global perspective. This is a large-scale collaborative effort involving a global network of physical anthropologists, archaeologists, paleoclimatologists, and environmental researchers.

Barbara Voorhies (Professor Emerita): Archaeologist Voorhies is interested in human adaptations to coastal settings in the Neotropics and in particular on ancient peoples who once occupied the hot, humid coastal plain of SW Mexico.  Guided by principles of ecology she and her collaborators are working to determine how and why these ancient peoples made the transition from a basic fisher-hunter-gatherer economy to one with greater emphasis on domesticated plants. 

Research Clusters:

Political Ecology: Shankar Aswani, Katharina Schreiber, Susan Stonich,

Cultural Ecology:  Shankar Aswani, Michael Gurven, Michael Jochim, Juan-Vicente Palerm, Katharina Schreiber, Barbara Voorhies

Behavioral Ecology / Evolutionary Ecology:  Shankar Aswani, Michael Glassow, Steven Gaulin, Michael Gurven, Michael Jochim, John Tooby, Phillip Walker

Environmental Anthropology: Shankar Aswani, Susan Stonich

Forager Ecology:  Shankar Aswani, Michael Glassow, Steven Gaulin, Michael Gurven, Michael Jochim, John Tooby, Led Cosmides

Maritime and Coastal Ecology:  Shankar Aswani, Michael Glassow, Susan Stonich, Barbara Voorhies

Health and Ecology: Michael Gurven, Phillip Walker

Agroecologies and Agroconomies: Juan-Vicente Palerm, David Cleveland

Related Research Units at UCSB:

The Bren School of Environmental Science & Management

The Bren School is one of the few schools in the United States to integrate science, management, law, economics, and policy as part of an interdisciplinary approach to environmental problem solving, and offers Master’s and Ph.D degrees in Environmental Science and Management.

The Environmental Studies Program

UCSB’s Environmental Studies Program is the largest such program in the United States, and one of the oldest.  It has 12 core faculty, and 9 affiliates, and offers B.A. degrees in Environmental Studies, B.S. degrees in Environmental Studies, and B.S. degrees in Hydrologic Sciences.

Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology

UCSB’s EEMB Department is one of the highest ranked evolutionary ecology programs in the world, with 35 faculty, offering Masters and Ph. D. degrees with an emphasis in ecology and evolution.

The Center for Evolutionary Psychology

UCSB’s Center for Evolutionary Psychology is an interdisciplinary research unit of six affiliated faculty.  Researchers at the Center study how the learning, reasoning, emotion, and motivational mechanisms of the human mind evolved to function in and reflect the long-term ecological structure of the world.

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