Kohler, Timothy

Tim A. Kohler [Regents Professor] received his A.B. in general studies from New College of Sarasota in 1972, and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Anthropology from the University of Florida in 1975 and 1978. His dissertation research on Weeden Island societies involved sampling the McKeithen village in North Florida. Since arriving at WSU in 1978, he has increasingly specialized in Southwestern archaeology. In the late 1970s through the mid-1980s, he collaborated with William D. Lipe on the Dolores Archaeological Program in southwestern Colorado. Since then, he has directed excavations in Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico, and the interdisciplinary NSF Coupled Natural & Human Systems-funded "Village Project" to understand the causes for changes in settlement systems in the eastern Southwest between A.D. 600 and 1500. He is a Research Associate at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center, Cortez, and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, New Mexico.

Much of his work involves quantitative analysis of archaeological data, along with simulation of aspects of prehistoric behavior. He is especially interested in cooperative behavior, reciprocity, and other evolutionary processes in Neolithic societies. At the graduate level he teaches ANTH 530 (Archaeological Method and Theory) and ANTH 547 (Models in Anthropology). In April 2004 he completed a four-year term as editor of American Antiquity. He currently directs an IGERT providing training to Ph.D. students in evolutionary modeling. Please see the IPEM website for more details. He is also involved with Digital Antiquity, an initiative to aggregate and preserve archaeological digital data and make it broadly accessible.