Professor of Anthropology, University of New Mexico
Keith Prufer is an environmental archaeologist and Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico and the Center for Stable Isotopes. His current work focuses on the ecology of foraging to farming in the tropical Maya Lowlands. He studies the demographic and environmental contexts in which humans became increasingly reliant on food management strategies during the Middle Holocene and how, over thousands of years, they fundamentally altered their biosphere through sustained promotion of economically important plants and animals. By the beginning of the Late Holocene there were adept farming communities across the tropics, and as populations grew they increasingly engaged in surplus food production paving the way for larger social formations with emergent leadership strategies and increasing social inequality.