JSpeth

Personal

Bio

John D. Speth holds an Arthur F. Thurnau Professorship for Outstanding Contributions to Undergraduate Education; he is also Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology and Curator of Archaeology in the Museum of Anthropology at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor). He served as Director of the Museum of Anthropology from 1986 to 1989 and as the Museum’s Associate Director from 2006 to 2008. Dr. Speth completed his BA in Geology at the University of New Mexico (1965), and his MA (1968) and PhD (1971) in Anthropology at the University of Michigan. Dr. Speth studies hunter-gatherers, past and present, New World and Old World. He is interested in the evolution of forager diet, subsistence strategies, and food processing technologies and, more specifically, in the ways that hunter-gatherers (and small-scale farmers) cope with seasonal and inter-annual unpredictability in their resource base. Largely through the study of prehistoric faunal remains, he also is exploring the nutritional and economic basis of Plains-Pueblo interaction in the American Southwest and Neanderthal hunting strategies in the Near East. Dr. Speth currently is an associate editor of Before Farming, and he serves as secretary-treasurer for the Irene Levi-Sala CARE Archaeological Foundation for Prehistoric Research in Israel. In the past he has been a member of the executive board of the Society for Ethnobiology, member of the National Science Foundation Archaeology Panel, member of the editorial board of Annual Review of Anthropology, member of the U.S. National Committee for the International Union of Quaternary Research (USNC/INQUA), member of the executive committee of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA), as well as chair of the SAA’s Professional Relations Committee.

URL

http://www.lsa.umich.edu/anthro/faculty_staff/speth.html

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