Francois Lanoe
University of Arkansas, AR·Social Science
How did the first people in the far north survive as the last Ice Age gave way to the modern environment? Eastern Beringia, which includes present-day Alaska, sits at the center of debates about how people first reached the Americas.
- Fields
Social Science
Earth & Environmental Science
- Topics
archaeology
anthropology
Beringia
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Sep 2027
What they work on
- Reconstruct subsistence economies at Broken Mammoth over time, including diet breadth and seasonal land use, through zooarchaeological analysis of the site's large animal bone collection.
- Identify the species behind bone fragments using biomolecular methods, including protein-based (proteomic) and genetic species identification, to refine the record of which animals people used.
- Investigate how early inhabitants procured and used stone raw materials, through lithic technological analysis of the site's artifact collection.
- Map site structure and activity areas across occupations dating from about 13,310 to 2,250 years ago, using plant macrofossils, spatial analysis and biochemical analysis of hearths.
More about the research
Early sites there hold rare evidence of what people ate, how they moved with the seasons and how they managed risk.
Why it matters
This work adds a detailed record of how early Alaskan foragers adjusted their food-getting, land use and risk management from first settlement to the recent past. It can inform models of how people peopled the Americas and adapted to the end of the Ice Age. Releasing the site's materials and primary data gives other researchers access to Beringia's largest animal-remains collection.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Justin Pargeter
New York University, NY·Social Science
Track how hunter-gatherers made, maintained, and repaired stone tools before and during a shift toward eating more fish and shellfish, using stone tool collections from two sites spanning the past 5,000 years.
Kurt Rademaker
Texas A&M University-College Station, TX·Social Science
Build high-resolution radiocarbon chronologies at the earliest and longest-occupied high-altitude sites to determine when people first settled the region and whether occupation was continuous or broken.
Alexandra Greenwald
University of Utah, UT·Social Science
Reconstruct the mobility and residential histories of 41 ancestors from a 12,000-9,000-year-old Bay Area mortuary site using strontium isotope analysis of tooth enamel, which records the geology of where a person lived as the enamel formed.
The school
University of Arkansas: 12 labs on PI Pages, $231M a year on research, 179 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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