Anthropology Department

Although the Mediterranean islands produced some of the most sophisticated cultures of the ancient world, until recently there was little evidence that these islands were occupied prior to the Neolithic. This perception has radically changed over the past decade. New research indicates that some remote islands, such as Crete and Naxos, may have been occupied by Neanderthals, and certainly by the Epipaleolithic it appears that continental-island voyages were far more common than previously believed.

My 2017 Stahl Award supported the care of artifacts recovered during the completion of excavations at Stanford University’s Arboretum Chinese Quarters (ACQ). Excavations carried out between November 2016 and June 2017, through a combination of Berkeley, Stanford, and local volunteer teams, recovered several thousand artifacts dating to the site’s occupation by Chinese employees of the Stanford family between 1876 and 1925.

Stahl funds contributed to David’s 2017 dissertation field research at the Samuel Adams Limekilns on Wilder Ranch State Park in Santa Cruz County, California. The goal of this project is to better understand the everyday lives and relations of a diverse set of laborers who lived and worked at the site from 1858 until 1906. Of particular interest are the ways in which broader changes to California, including widespread immigration, industrialization, and transportation advancements affected power dynamics and social relations between different labor groups.

My research takes an interdisciplinary approach to human-environment interaction, considering individual, community and regional scales in a socially complex landscape. My research area, pre-Hispanic Nicaragua, is an ideal location for this study because of its extensive ecological variation at both local and regional scales, allowing for the study of multiscalar variability across the landscape.

Chilcote, Celise ; Waters-Rist, Andrea L; Hoogland, Menno H; Agarwal, Sabrina C., 2015.  A Biocultural Approach to Social Identity at Historical Middenbeemster.

Agarwal, Sabrina C; Beauchesne, Patrick; Kinkopf, Katherine; Trombley, Trent, 2015. A Bioarchaeological Study of Growth, Aging, and Lifestyle in Medieval Rural Italy