The Author: Ryan Gardner-Cook, PhD
I am an anthropologist specializing in archaeology, as well as a public policy researcher. In both fields, my research relies heavily on geospatial methods to model social-environmental structures–from ecological niches to neighborhood demographics. This approach shows how these physical and social characteristics grow and change across a landscape, which significantly affects people and the communities they live in.
For example, my public policy research has focused on things like the effects of transit access and the food retail environment on health outcomes in different populations. In archaeology, my research has used spatial models to reconstruct landscapes and social structures, which help us understand how different aspects of societies affect their resilience–both in the past and present.
Societal Resilience
My main archaeological research revolves around whether societies vary in their resilience to dramatic change (such as “collapse”) based on the underlying environmental, social, and political characteristics of their communities. The goal is to bridge the gap both in our understanding of specific episodes of dramatic change (e.g., The Late Bronze Age Collapse), as well as the broader anthropological gap in understanding deep underlying factors that structure change in all complex societies.
If we are to address modern anxieties and overcome the enormous challenges facing us, we need to build models for societal resilience that identify the most important social-ecological dynamics of past societies–the traits that helped them adapt in the face of crisis instead of collapse. In this way, we can reveal strategies to bolster the resilience of our societies before it is too late.
My goal is to bring these insights to a broader audience and help people understand what archaeology has to say about the past, present and future!
How do we know what we know in archaeology?
While the main goal of this blog is to explore the resilience of past societies, I also hope to provide examples of how archaeologists know what they know about past societies. This will include everything from the survey and excavation data that form the foundation of archaeological analysis to the ethnographic analogies that allow us to draw conclusions about human culture and behavior from those data.