Keith Prufer

Bio

Keith Prufer is an Associate Professor in the anthropology department and an environmental archaeologist working primarily in the tropical rainforests of Belize. From 2008-2013 he directed the NSF-HSD collaborative project “Development and resilience of complex socioeconomic systems: A theoretical model and case study from the Maya Lowlands” with partners at six other universities in the US and Europe. In 2014 he began a new project “Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene Climate Change and Human Ecology in the Tropical Maya Lowlands” which is funded by the Alphawood Foundation (2014-2018). This project seeks to link human subsistence and mobility decision making to environmental and climate change from 14,000 years ago to the dawn of agriculture. This project involves a speleothem based reconstruction of climate for the Holocene as well as reconstructions of paleodiet and shifts in resource exploitation from isotopic signatures of human and faunal remains.