Utah State University
Department of SSW&A
0730 Old Main Hill
Logan, UT 84322-0730
Tel. 435-797-1230
Fax 435-797-1240
ann.johns@usu.edu

department of
Sociology, Social Work & Anthropology

Old Main 245B
(435) 797-1178
chris.morgan@usu.edu

Dr. Christopher Morgan's (Ph.D. University of California, Davis; assistant professor), research focuses on the archaeology of hunter-gatherers and the way climate change, migration, and internal and external population dynamics affect behavior. He uses GIS and models derived from behavioral ecology to analyze foraging economies and the way these interact with and inform social and political structure, particularly for groups living in marginal environments like mountains and deserts. Most of his fieldwork is in the American west, especially California's Sierra Nevada, where he's reconstructed the ecology of late Holocene settlement systems and paleoclimatic fluctuations like the Little Ice Age, ultimately modeling the historical and evolutionary consequences of these relationships. Most recently he's moved to looking at the spread of modern humans into East Asia and the adoption of agriculture in northern China, correlating these phenomena with fundamental changes in settlement, technology, and environment. He has subsidiary interests in geoarchaeology and lithic analyses and is currently looking at the environmental and behavioral variables conditioning the success or failure of different types of foraging economies.

Dr. Morgan's classes include: World Archaeology, Archaeology in North America, and Topics in Anthropology.

Vita for Dr. Morgan