Education

Ph.D. Anthropology, University of Georgia 1983

Expertise & Interests

I am fascinated by the economic lives of people in rural places, where food and other resources come from the land, forest, and sea.  Rural economies are highly diversified, partially integrated into markets, and vulnerable to risk and uncertainty.  We often think of them as "traditional," and traditions are important; but they have experienced long histories of social change.

I study significant transitions in human history, specializing in the application of archaeological science to the study of collective social formations and the historical ecology of wetland and coastal environments. In the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf coasts, my recent research focuses on socioecological histories and zooarchaeological indicators to achieve high resolution, localized histories of human-climate dynamics. More broadly, my work centers on the nature of Indigenous governance by addressing cases that demonstrate the variability in the forms that democratic institutions might take.

I study how the environment, biology, and culture shape human health and disease. My recent research in Panama focuses on Zoonotic diseases and deforestation, while in Bolivia, I study nutrition, health, and life history. I am interested in how individual and household conditions may shape disease patterns, and also how they shape childhood growth, diet, and nutrition.

I am a zooarchaeologist who focuses on Latin American and southeastern archaeology with an emphasis on ecological and ecological archaeology. As the head of the zooarchaeology lab and as a consultant, I work with collections management.

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.