James F. O'Connell

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James F. O'Connell is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Utah. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America and is on the editorial board of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [1] [2]

University of Utah public coeducational space-grant research university in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States

The University of Utah is a public research university in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States. As the state's flagship university, it offers more than 100 undergraduate majors and more than 92 graduate degree programs. The university is classified among "Doctoral Universities – Very High Research Activity" with "selective, higher transfer-in" admissions. Graduate studies include the S.J. Quinney College of Law and the School of Medicine, Utah's first medical school. As of Fall 2018, there are 24,735 undergraduate students and 8,251 graduate students, for an enrollment total of 32,994.

Contents

Early life

O'Connell was born in San Francisco, California. He became interested in natural history as a child, facilitated by the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park, which was near his family home. After graduating from St. Ignatius College Preparatory, he undertook coursework at University of San Francisco for two years before he moved across the bay to attend the University of California at Berkeley.

San Francisco Consolidated city-county in California, US

San Francisco, officially City and County of San Francisco and colloquially known as SF, San Fran, or "The City", is the cultural, commercial, and financial center of Northern California. San Francisco is the 13th most populous city in the United States, and the fourth most populous in California, with 883,305 residents as of 2018. It covers an area of about 46.89 square miles (121.4 km2), mostly at the north end of the San Francisco Peninsula in the San Francisco Bay Area, making it the second most densely populated large U.S. city, and the fifth most densely populated U.S. county, behind only four of the five New York City boroughs. San Francisco is the 12th-largest metropolitan statistical area in the United States, with 4,729,484 people in 2018. With San Jose, it forms the fifth most populous combined statistical area in the United States, the San Jose–San Francisco–Oakland, CA Combined Statistical Area.

California Academy of Sciences natural history museum in San Francisco

The California Academy of Sciences is a research institute and natural history museum in San Francisco, California, that is among the largest museums of natural history in the world, housing over 46 million specimens. The Academy began in 1853 as a learned society and still carries out a large amount of original research. It is California's oldest museum.

Golden Gate Park large park in San Francisco, California

Golden Gate Park, located in San Francisco, California, United States, is a large urban park consisting of 1,017 acres (412 ha) of public grounds. It is administered by the San Francisco Recreation & Parks Department, which began in 1871 to oversee the development of Golden Gate Park. Configured as a rectangle, it is similar in shape to but 20 percent larger than Central Park in New York City, to which it is often compared. It is over three miles (4.8 km) long east to west, and about half a mile (0.8 km) north to south. With 24 million visitors annually, Golden Gate is the third most-visited city park in the United States after Central Park and the Lincoln Memorial.

Career

O'Connell earned his undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at UC Berkeley. Working with Robert Heizer, his PhD dissertation examined the prehistoric archaeology of Surprise Valley, California. [3] After graduation, he took a post at the University of California at Riverside for three years before accepting a research fellowship at the Australian National University (ANU). There he undertook ethnoarchaeological work with Alyawarra and Anmatjere speakers (dialects of Arrernte) near Bendaijerum station in the Northern Territory of Australia. Though originally planned as a study of site structure, O'Connell had been recently influenced by Robert MacArthur's Geographical Ecology, [4] which led him to undertake quantitative observations of subsistence behavior [5] in addition to studies of material remains. [6] After several years at ANU, O'Connell accepted a position at the University of Utah.

Robert Fleming Heizer was an archaeologist who conducted extensive fieldwork and reporting in California, the Southwestern United States, and the Great Basin.

Australian National University National research university in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory

The Australian National University (ANU) is a national research university located in Canberra, the capital of Australia. Its main campus in Acton encompasses seven teaching and research colleges, in addition to several national academies and institutes.

Since arriving at Utah in 1978, O'Connell has continued to undertake ethnoarchaeological and archaeological research in Western North America and Australia. He also started additional projects in Africa, most notably his research with Hadza hunter-gatherers in Tanzania. Collaborating with Kristen Hawkes and Nicholas Blurton Jones, research has sought to explain the evolution of human life histories, [7] Plio/Pleistocene hominid hunting strategies [8] and the emergence of the genus Homo [9] from an evolutionary ecological perspective.

Hadza people ethnic group

The Hadza, or Hadzabe, are an indigenous ethnic group in north-central Tanzania, living around Lake Eyasi in the central Rift Valley and in the neighboring Serengeti Plateau. There are, as of 2015, between 1,200 and 1,300 Hadza people living in Tanzania, however only around 300 Hadza still survive exclusively based on the traditional means of foraging. Additionally, the increasing impact of tourism and encroaching pastoralists pose serious threats to the continuation of their traditional way of life.

<i>Homo</i> Genus of mammals

Homo is the genus which emerged in the otherwise extinct genus Australopithecus that encompasses the extant species Homo sapiens, plus several extinct species classified as either ancestral to or closely related to modern humans, most notably Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis. The genus is taken to emerge with the appearance of Homo habilis, just over two million years ago. Genus Homo, together with the genus Paranthropus is probably sister to A. africanus in the genus Australopithecus, which itself had previously split from the lineage of Pan, the chimpanzees.

To date, he has published over 150 journal articles and book chapters, including seminal work applying evolutionary ecology to human behavior, [10] novel ethnoarchaeological work linking behavioral ecological explanations of human behavior to its material consequences [11] and applying these insights to prehistory. [12] Applications of the latter include recent work directed toward understanding the Pleistocene colonization of Sahul (Pleistocene Australia/New Guinea). [13] [14]

Evolutionary ecology Study of how interactions among species and between species and their environment affect species through selection and adaptation

Evolutionary ecology lies at the intersection of ecology and evolutionary biology. It approaches the study of ecology in a way that explicitly considers the evolutionary histories of species and the interactions between them. Conversely, it can be seen as an approach to the study of evolution that incorporates an understanding of the interactions between the species under consideration. The main subfields of evolutionary ecology are life history evolution, sociobiology, the evolution of inter specific relations and the evolution of biodiversity and of communities.

Ethnoarchaeology is the ethnographic study of peoples for archaeological reasons, usually through the study of the material remains of a society. Ethnoarchaeology aids archaeologists in reconstructing ancient lifeways by studying the material and non-material traditions of modern societies. Ethnoarchaeology also aids in the understanding of the way an object was made and the purpose of what it is being used for. Archaeologists can then infer that ancient societies used the same techniques as their modern counterparts given a similar set of environmental circumstances.

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References

  1. ↑ http://anthropology.pnas.org/page/about
  2. ↑ http://nrc88.nas.edu/pnas_search/memberDetails.aspx?ctID=20012508
  3. ↑ O'Connell, James F. (1971). The archeology and cultural ecology of Surprise Valley, northeast California. Unpublished PhD. Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.
  4. ↑ MacArthur, R.H. (1972). Geographical Ecology: Patterns in the Distribution of Species. Princeton University Press
  5. ↑ O'Connell, J. F., & Hawkes, K. (1981). Alyawara plant use and optimal foraging theory. Hunter-gatherer foraging strategies: Ethnographic and archaeological analyses, 99-125.
  6. ↑ O'Connell, J. F. (1987). Alyawara site structure and its archaeological implications. American Antiquity, 74-108.
  7. ↑ Hawkes, K., O'Connell, J. F., Jones, N. B., Alvarez, H., & Charnov, E. L. (1998). Grandmothering, menopause, and the evolution of human life histories. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 95(3), 1336-1339.
  8. ↑ O'Connell, J. F., Hawkes, K., & Jones, N. B. (1988). Hadza scavenging: Implications for Plio/Pleistocene hominid subsistence. Current Anthropology, 356-363.
  9. ↑ O'Connell, J. F., Hawkes, K., Lupo, K. D., & Jones, N. B. (2002). Male strategies and Plio-Pleistocene archaeology. Journal of Human Evolution, 43(6), 831-872.
  10. ↑ Hawkes, K., Hill, K., & O'Connell, J. F. (1982). Why hunters gather: optimal foraging and the Ache of eastern Paraguay. American Ethnologist, 9(2), 379-398.
  11. ↑ O'Connell, J. F. (1995). Ethnoarchaeology needs a general theory of behavior. Journal of Archaeological Research, 3(3), 205-255.
  12. ↑ O'Connell, J. F., Hawkes, K., & Blurton-Jones, N. G. (1992). Patterns in the distribution, site structure and assemblage composition of Hadza kill-butchering sites. Journal of Archaeological Science, 19(3), 319-345.
  13. ↑ O'Connell, J. F., & Allen, J. (2012). The restaurant at the end of the universe: modelling the colonisation of Sahul. Australian Archaeology, 74:5-17.
  14. ↑ O'Connell, J. F., & Allen, J. (2015). The process, biotic impact, and global implications of the human colonization of Sahul about 47,000 years ago. Journal of Archaeological Science 56:73-87
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