Crabtree, Stefani

Stefani is a current Masters student in anthropology and an NSF graduate research fellow.  She began studying archaeology as an exchange student in Paris taking classes in Egyptology and the Archaeology of Islam. Returning to Scripps College in Claremont, CA she majored in Anthropology and French, writing her undergraduate thesis on a Gallo-Roman site she helped excavate in 2003. Upon graduation she was awarded a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship which enabled her to complete a multi-sited ethnography on how women of indigenous cultures use traditional medicine in pregnancy and childbirth researching in New Zealand, Samoa, India and Vietnam. Since returning to the country she has worked for a non-profit human rights organization and two cultural resource management firms—CRAI and SWCA Environmental Consultants as crew member, assistant crew chief and crew chief.

Stefani is interested in questions of how humans’ decisions have affected their overall evolutionary fitness, and how changes in the environment forced humanity to adapt differing strategies to ensure their overall survival. She believes that through understanding which adaptive choices of previous hominids were successful and which failed, we can help provide transformative options to the parallel and potentially equally drastic problems humans are facing today.