Archaeology Our archaeology faculty engages with both the past and the present as they reconstruct the history of sites and the landscapes they occupied. They actively incorporate both undergraduate and graduate students in research determining conditions prevalent in the past such as the climate, available natural resources, and the agricultural potential of the land to develop histories of the expansion and demise of ancient cultures. In examining the long-term back and forth between ecological and cultural systems our faculty also help illustrate and predict current trends in the human-environment relation. Using airborne remote sensing technologies in combination with magnetic gradient and electrical resistivity surveys they are able to reconstruct entire settlements. Systematic excavation and artifact collection remain an invaluable part of their research and the Laboratory of Archaeology is a repository of materials from over 50,000 archaeological sites in Georgia. In the zooarchaeological research of our faculty, they combine anthropology and biology to study the allometry of animals, fish and shellfish used as human food, and combine DNA and isotopic analysis of mollusk valves and fish otoliths with the taphonomic influences of rodents and carnivores on depositional environments of food remains.Current research includes: Indigenous governance, climate and culture change, and doing collaborative archaeology in the American Southeast. Developing social complexity and cultural diversity in Indigenous Pre-Columbian Eastern North America and non-state societies globally. Impacts of shipbuilding and coastal settlement on ancient forests and the environment in the Mediterranean. Social, cultural, and ecological changes in early farming societies in prehistoric Hungary and Southeast Europe. Socio-cultural complexity and development in early Hungary and Greece. Diet, mobility, and settlement systems of Eurasia in the period spanning the end of the last ice age to the arrival of farming. Submerged Early Man sites off the coast of Georgia.
