Two complex systems lectures by archaeologist Scott Ortman, March 20 and 21
by Michelle Saport |
"Winds from the north: Resolving one of the great mysteries in American archaeology"
Wednesday, March 20, 7 p.m.
Rasmuson Hall, Room 101
An enduring problem in North American archaeology is the relationship between the present-day Pueblos of New Mexico and the ancestral Pueblo society of the Mesa Verde region. Scott Ortman integrates biological, linguistic, cultural and archaeological evidence to trace the origins of the Tewa-speaking pueblos, reveal their relationships with Mesa Verde and relate this process to the evolution of global human diversity.
"Culture and the accumulation of social complexity"
Thursday, March 21, 12-1 p.m.
Allied Health Sciences Building, Room 106
Human societies have grown exponentially in scale and complexity over the past ten thousand years, but the basic drivers of this process remain poorly understood. Scott Ortman suggests that conceptual systems or "culture" played an important role in this process. Social complexity is grounded in conceptual metaphors that recruit our primary emotions and instincts to develop social coordination. Ortman illustrates this hypothesis using examples from the ancient Near East and the U.S. Southwest.
About the speaker:
Scott Ortman, Ph.D., is currently an Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute and
a Lightfoot Fellow at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center. He received his doctorate
in anthropology in 2010 from Arizona State University, with his dissertation winning
the 2011 Outstanding Dissertation Award from the Society for American Archaeology.
His special interest areas include agent-based modeling of social and natural systems
and coupled human-natural systems in the American Southwest.
"Two complex systems lectures by archaeologist Scott Ortman, March 20 and 21" is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.