Science and Engineering Scholarships and Fellowships Blog

Anthropology Makes History-Students Receive NSF Graduate Research Fellowships

For the first time in Washington State University history, two students from the anthropology department have received Graduate Research Fellowships. The two students, Stefani Crabtree and Kyle Bocinsky, are both working with the NSF funded Village Ecodynamics Project (VEP).

Modeling in the VEP involves computer simulation to recreate an area in the southwestern region of the United States. They input various important factors, such as farming soil, access to water, and access to animals for hunting, into the model in an attempt to recreate the human and climatic conditions of the time.

Simulated “residents” (agents) situate themselves on the landscape in relation to these critical resources, and VEP researchers compare the resulting conditions to the actual archaeological record. In this way, Crabtree, Bocinsky and other researchers are able to draw conclusions about what may have actually occurred in the past.

Researchers from the VEP hope agent-based models like these will provide answers to the mysteries surrounding climate change and sudden emigration from the region.

Stefani Crabtree, courtesty of Washington State University

Crabtree plans to use the platform of the VEP to analyze how alliance formation among ancient societies helped them deal with marginal environments and what triggers made those alliances collapse and result in warfare. She anticipates that these alliances will help her to better understand the vast and complete depopulation of the central Mesa Verde region.

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Kyle Bocinsky, courtesy of Washington State University

Second-year master’s student Bocinsky also works with the NSF funded VEP. Through his research he hopes to broaden archaeologists’ understanding of how turkey domestication spread across the southwest region of the United States.

Bocinsky has designed a module for the village simulation allowing people to hunt and domesticate wild turkeys, which show up abundantly in the archeological record and may have been a critical resource for people in the past.

He seeks to use innovative research methods to extract ancient DNA from turkey eggshells found at the site, which he believes will reveal the diet and the breeding habits of these ancient birds.