Alexandra Greenwald
University of Utah, UT·Social Science
As the last Ice Age ended, the first peoples of North America were spreading across the continent while the climate shifted rapidly around them. How those communities moved, ate, raised children, and organized families during this Pleistocene-Holocene Transition is poorly known, largely because very few archaeological sites from the period survive.
- Fields
Social Science
Earth & Environmental Science
Ecology & Evolution
- Topics
bioarchaeology
Pleistocene-Holocene Transition
peopling of the Americas
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2027
What they work on
- 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.
- Reconstruct childhood diet, weaning age and parental investment by measuring carbon and nitrogen stable isotopes in serial dentine sections of first and third molars, each slice recording a known period of early life.
- Estimate the biological sex of each individual using proteomic analysis of proteins preserved in dental tissue, providing sex determinations independent of skeletal shape.
- Assemble the biological, dietary and mobility evidence into osteobiographies of individual ancestors, developed with the Muwekma Ohlone Indian Tribe, to address kinship systems, fertility and adaptation to rapid post-Ice-Age climate change.
More about the research
This project works on one unusually rich exception: a burial ground in the San Francisco Bay Area, dating to roughly 12,000-9,000 years ago, containing 41 Indigenous ancestors. It is among the oldest known mortuary sites on the continent, and the research is carried out in collaboration with the Muwekma Ohlone Indian Tribe, whose ancestors used the site.
Why it matters
Evidence from this period is scarce, so each line of data expands what is known about how the earliest residents of North America lived and adapted as the Ice Age ended. Because the work is designed with the Muwekma Ohlone Indian Tribe, it also returns detailed knowledge of ancestors' lives and mobility to a descendant community, offering a model for archaeology conducted as collaboration rather than extraction.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Francois Lanoe
University of Arkansas, AR·Social Science
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.
Claire Ebert
University of Pittsburgh, PA·Social Science
Reconstruct diet and mobility in an early complex society through isotopic analysis of chemical signatures in human skeletal remains.
Wyatt Oswald
Emerson College, MA·Earth & Environmental Science
Reconstruct past temperatures in northern New England across the end of the Younger Dryas using chironomid insect fossils preserved in lake sediments.
The school
University of Utah: 58 labs on PI Pages, $789M a year on research, 366 research doctorates a year.
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