Leveraging the Archaeological Past to Understand our Present and Future

 Archaeology offers a unique perspective on how human decisions shape ecosystems and how ecosystems impact people from deep-time until today. In this talk, I demonstrate how approaches from complex adaptive systems science, such as agent-based modeling and network analysis, have helped resolve long standing debates about human migration and reveal the ways humans have functioned as integral components of ecological systems. These methods elucidate the cumulative consequences of individual and collective choices, allowing us to trace how small-scale decisions scale up to produce enduring environmental and social patterns. By situating contemporary sustainability challenges within these deep historical trajectories, archaeology provides critical insights into resilience, adaptation, and unintended consequences that are often less clear in datasets with shorter temporal sequences. This perspective underscores the value of archaeological and anthropological knowledge for understanding present-day human-environment relationships and for informing more sustainable futures.

Biography

Stefani Crabtree is a computational social scientist whose research integrates anthropology, archaeology, and socio-environmental modeling to understand the deep history of human-environment interactions. She holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Washington State University (2016) and a Ph.D. in Archéologie, territoires, et environnements from the Université de Franche-Comté (2017). Her work combines quantitative modeling approaches with community-based ethnography and archaeological data to examine how humans have long been embedded within--and have actively shaped--ecological systems. Her research focuses on how decisions made thousands to tens of thousands of years ago continue to structure landscapes and ecosystems today. She is External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute and Associate Professor of Socio-Environmental Modeling in the Department of Environment and Society at Utah State University. Her recent publications include a paper in Nature Human Behaviour examining human migration into Australia approximately 70,000 years ago, a contribution to Trends in Ecology & Evolution arguing for deeper integration between archaeology and ecology, and two books on complex adaptive systems in the social sciences: Agent-Based Modeling for Archaeology: Simulating the Complexity of Societies and Thinking Through Archaeological Complexity. Outside of academia, Crabtree has recently taken up watercolor painting as a way to explore and represent human–environment relationships through art.