Current CV

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Research Summary

My research is informed by the principles of historical ecology, which attempts to integrate the notions of ecology and the environment as central themes in the study of human societies and focuses on landscape-scale processes of long-terms (spanning from the end of the Ice Age to the historic period) human-environment interactions across various environmental settings (Great Plains grasslands, Rocky Mountains, Mid-Atlantic Coastal Plains, and American Southwest). Currently, I am involved in three different research projects.

Dogs and People during Colonial Contact

My newest project, in collaboration colleagues Dr. Ariane Thomas and Dr. Andrew Kitchen, explores the changing human-dog relationship that arise from the appearance of European colonist in Native North Americans. This project combines tradition al zooarchaeological analyses of archaeological dogs remains with detailed study of geomorphometrics, ancient DNA, and stable isotopes and uses collections from pre-contact and post-contact period archaeological sites from multiple regions, including Great Plains, Mid-Atlantic Coastal Plains, Rocky Mountains, and Upper Midwest. The goal of this work is to understand whether dogs living with different human groups vary in body size and shape, diets, dog genetic lineages, and human use.

Colonialism and Changes to Identify and Social Landscapes. 

The second project involve the study of economic and technological change among late 17th-early 18th century Native American farmers in Western Kansas. This work looks at the changes in the diet and culture of historic period Native American who abandoned sedentary pueblo villages in the northwestern corner of New Mexico and took up residence among Great Plains bison hunters in western Kansas following the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. This is a collaborative project with Dr. Margaret Beck (University of Iowa) and various Iowa graduate and undergraduate students. My work focuses on understanding how the cuisine choice of these migrants informs about their adaptation to a new environments and their degree of cultural interaction with the indigenous Plains populations. This study has involved new excavations combined with reanalysis of museum collections.

Interrelationships between humans and animal communities

The third project investigates long-term changes among big-game hunters on the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains. Since 1992, this project has focused on investigating the adaptive strategies among big-game hunters on the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains. The new dimension to this research program has been a greater emphasis on diachronic change in past regional land-use and subsistence adaptions in the Great Plains of North America. I not only attempt to sort through the effects of synchronic and diachronic environmental variability but also consider how social factors, such as introduction of new technologies, human demographic shifts, and changes in social organization influence long-term trends in land-use and subsistence practice of Native Americans. This project involve building a new dataset of zooarchaeological stat from ~575 localities dating from 13,000-500 years old as well as the reanalysis of a series of faunal collections.

Prospective Graduate Students

I am current taking new graduate students. Students interested in working on projects related to zooarchaeology, Native North America, dogs, and bison should email me (matthew-e-hill@uiowa.edu) to discuss the possibility of applying to our graduate program.