My research seeks to explain how human beings come to physically embody the biological and social aspects of our environments. In varying sites across Europe, my work encapsulates the challenges of bioarchaeological analysis as the most direct indicator of human behavior. I examine diet change from the time of Greek colonization to the Medieval period, and I also helped geochemically assess archaeological human remains to test early written history.

I have a joint appointment in Anthropology and Geography and direct the Quaternary Isotope Paleoecology Lab. My research is focused on human adaptation and resilience to climate change and natural resource unpredictability in prehistory, and how our understanding of past human response to environmental change informs current thinking about these issues. I combine archaeology and biogeochemistry to investigate changes in diet, mobility, and settlement systems in the period spanning the end of the last ice age to the arrival of farming. 

I didn’t always plan to be an anthropologist. However, during an undergrad anthropology course I realized that the field of anthropology would provide an excellent arena to pursue my innate curiosity about the diversity of people and their interactions with each other and their environments. My goal as an anthropologist is to pursue research that is intellectually challenging and that enhances our abilities to resolve complex social and environmental issues. My intellectual interests span scales that include individual households, communities, watersheds, regions, and nations.

I am interested in the interface between the way people see the elements and interrelationships in their environment with the way they decide and act in that environment. Further, I am concerned with the way the lenses people carry around in their heads are structured by the messages they received over time as they were growing up (and continue to receive when they are grown-up!) as members of a particular class, gender, and ethnicity.

“Anthropology is the essential field.” Kowalewski was raised in rural Lancaster County, PA. First field school in Utah, 1967, and first fieldwork in Oaxaca, 1970. Assistant professor at Lehman and Hunter, CUNY, 1975-1977. Has lived in Athens since 1978. Major field projects in Oaxaca in 1974, 1977, 1980, 1983, 1990, 1999, 2008, 2009, 2011, funded by NSF, NGS, SSRC, SSHRC, Harp Foundation.

While a South Asianist by training, my most recent research interest has shifted to Europe and the Roma/Romani/Sinti peoples who left India over one thousand years ago and are now dispersed over most of Europe. I am specifically interested in Roma activism that focuses on: educating Roma youth (about the Romani Holocaust or Porajmos and the history of discrimination in Europe) and on the legal action of civil society groups against discrimination in education, housing, employment, and freedom of movement within the EU.

My research over the last 20 years has centered on the origin and practice of agropastoralism in the Pyrenees Mountains and Iberian Systems of continental Europe. I am particularly interested in the pivotal role played by agropastoralism in the social, political, economic and religious transformations in the Franco-Iberian region during the last 2,000 years. I seldom work alone and my collaborations are designed to integrate geomorphic, geophysical, archaeological and socioecological evidence to reveal the contingency and behavioral variability of human agents in tran

My scholarship has shifted from constructive (policy- and practice-oriented) to more critical orientations over time, yet I have an ongoing interest in engaged research in the service of social justice and environmental sustainability. Themes of ongoing interest include land and environmental governance; the political-economic and ontological roots of inequality; and how theory and method can be deployed in support of more sustainable, anti-oppressive futures.

My research focuses in part on the application of geoarchaeological methods to the study Early and Middle Holocene human occupation, cultural adaptations and climate change. In our research on the continental shelves of the American Southeast we have sought to discriminate between ecological variables and culturally-based decisions for detecting the spatial and temporal variation in site locations.

Much of my research has been engaged with issues related to the political ecology of environmental degradation, indigenous rights, and conservation in Sarawak, Malaysia (Borneo). My research in Sarawak initially focused on the international rainforest campaign centered on Penan hunter-gatherers, and I continue to be involved in efforts to seek acknowledgement of Penan land claims in oil palm plantations and national parks.