Brian Stewart
My primary research interest is to understand how Palaeolithic foragers organised, manipulated and conceived of space on a range of scales, from intra-site to landscape. My masters and doctoral work at the University of Oxford was concerned with the use of space by southern African hunter-gatherers in the Later Stone Age (LSA). The former focused on a large, complex rock art panel from the Phokojoeng Valley, Lesotho. I explored how the artists manipulated space on the rock canvass, expressing shamanistic ideas and narratives using figure directionality. For my doctoral research I performed a comprehensive intra-site spatial analyses to illuminate patterning in domestic organisation at the South African LSA site, Dunefield Midden, one of the world’s most horizontally extensive Palaeolithic campsites. I refitted diverse subsistence remains (ceramics, tortoise shell and the bones of differently-sized bovid taxa) and employed an integrated relational/GIS database to analyse the resultant patterning. Ethnoarchaeologically-derived models were then employed to develop a detailed picture of on-site subsistence organisation structured by social interaction.
From 2008-2012 I undertook postdoctoral research at the University of Cambridge, first as a Junior Research Fellow at Homerton College and then as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. In 2012 I moved to Harvard University for a one-year College Fellowship and then in September 2013 I took up a tenure-track position at the University of Michigan. In 2010 myself and my colleague Genevieve Dewar (University of Toronto) initiated the ongoing research project, 'Adaptations to Marginal Environments in the Middle Stone Age' (AMEMSA). The project aims to help understand where, when, how and under what environmental conditions in Africa our species developed the capacity for adapting so rapidly and ingeniously to virtually the full range of global habitats, including those which are very marginal (i.e. those with low primary productivity and/or predictability). To accomplish this, we are investigating human responses to two marginal landscapes in southern Africa: highland Lesotho and sub-arid Namaqualand (South Africa).
The project involves multidisciplinary investigations of sediment sequences at several prominent rockshelters in both regions. Our work to-date has focused on establishing high-resolution cultural, geochronological and palaeoenvironmental frameworks for these two marginal ecosystems using these excavated sequences. Future research will see us move 'beyond the dripline' to record and analyse the rich open-air archaeological and palaeoenvironmental records that abound in the mountain and desert landscapes surrounding the shelters. Relating these back to the sequences using a variety of comparative techniques will afford a rare understanding of the very processes by which early modern humans in Africa learned to spatially organise themselves on the landscape in order to optimally exploit and thus adapt to challenging environments.
Please visit us at www.amemsa.com
Address: Museum of Anthropological Archaeology
University of Michigan
Ruthven Museums Building
University of Michigan
1109 Geddes Avenue
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
USA
From 2008-2012 I undertook postdoctoral research at the University of Cambridge, first as a Junior Research Fellow at Homerton College and then as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. In 2012 I moved to Harvard University for a one-year College Fellowship and then in September 2013 I took up a tenure-track position at the University of Michigan. In 2010 myself and my colleague Genevieve Dewar (University of Toronto) initiated the ongoing research project, 'Adaptations to Marginal Environments in the Middle Stone Age' (AMEMSA). The project aims to help understand where, when, how and under what environmental conditions in Africa our species developed the capacity for adapting so rapidly and ingeniously to virtually the full range of global habitats, including those which are very marginal (i.e. those with low primary productivity and/or predictability). To accomplish this, we are investigating human responses to two marginal landscapes in southern Africa: highland Lesotho and sub-arid Namaqualand (South Africa).
The project involves multidisciplinary investigations of sediment sequences at several prominent rockshelters in both regions. Our work to-date has focused on establishing high-resolution cultural, geochronological and palaeoenvironmental frameworks for these two marginal ecosystems using these excavated sequences. Future research will see us move 'beyond the dripline' to record and analyse the rich open-air archaeological and palaeoenvironmental records that abound in the mountain and desert landscapes surrounding the shelters. Relating these back to the sequences using a variety of comparative techniques will afford a rare understanding of the very processes by which early modern humans in Africa learned to spatially organise themselves on the landscape in order to optimally exploit and thus adapt to challenging environments.
Please visit us at www.amemsa.com
Address: Museum of Anthropological Archaeology
University of Michigan
Ruthven Museums Building
University of Michigan
1109 Geddes Avenue
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
USA
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Issue highlights selected topics pertaining to the varied Late Quaternary
peoples and environments of the mountains across time and space.