Matthew E. Hill
Assistant Professor
Office: 206 MH
Phone: (319) 335-2890
matthew-e-hill@uiowa.edu
- Select Publications/Projects (PDF)
- Curriculum Vitae (PDF)
I am an archaeologist interested in how humans interacted with and affected the changing environments of North America over the last 12,000 years. My research spans from Ice Age bison hunting in the Great Plains to 15th century mobile farmers in the deserts of the American Southwest. A common theme in my work is trying to understand how populations who continually move across the landscape find creative ways of making a living.
Currently I am involved in three different research projects. The first considers how late 17th century Native American farmers changed their diet and lifestyle when they left their sedentary pueblo villages in the northwestern corner of New Mexico and took up a more mobile lifestyle among Great Plains bison hunters in Kansas following the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. The second project considers whether the actions of small bands of Ice Age big-game hunters living in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains created the wildlife landscape that dominated the region during early historic times. Specifically, I am trying to determine whether human hunting caused the extinction of a wide variety of large-bodied mammals in North America, including the mammoth, horse, and camel, or if human predation was behind the rapid decrease in the body size of bison across the continent. The third project explores how groups of mobile hunters and gatherers living around lakes and wetlands in the Plains of San Augustin in west-central New Mexico reacted to rapid warming and drying of the climate around 11,000-13,000 years ago.
Courses Taught:
113:126 Animals, Culture, and Food 113:179 Pleistocene Peopling of the Americas 113:181 Archaeology of the Great Plains |
Affiliations & Links
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