Dr. Christopher Morgan

Biography

My research focuses on the hunter-gatherer archaeology of the American West, China, Mongolia, and the southern Andes, with an emphasis on behavioral adaptations to high-altitude, desert, and other marginal environments. I am particularly interested in the ways mobility, storage, and settlement patterns articulate with paleoenvironmental change and the evolution of different types of hunter-gatherer sociocultural organization.

In the America West, I study the archaeology of Numic-speaking peoples across and beyond the Great Basin, the evolution of Archaic lifeways, and the different ways hunter-gatherers in the region exploited mountain environments. In China, I focus on more fundamental evolutionary questions: Lower to Upper Paleolithic transitions, the arrival or evolution of modern humans and human behavior, and the forager to farmer sequence between the Yellow and Wei rivers. In Mongolia, I collaborats with the National Museum of Mongolia on projects that track the origins of pastoral economies and the northeast Asian microblade adaptation. In the southern Andes, I work on collaborative projects with the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina that investigate the ways the region’s hunter-gatherers adapted to high altitude settings.