{"id":22,"date":"2012-09-05T11:22:33","date_gmt":"2012-09-05T15:22:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/template\/?page_id=22"},"modified":"2026-03-19T08:54:57","modified_gmt":"2026-03-19T12:54:57","slug":"research","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/daniel-contreras\/research\/","title":{"rendered":"Research"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<section class=\"fullwidth-text-block\">\r\n\t<div class=\"container px-0 pt-5\">\r\n\t\t<div class=\"row align-items-start\">\r\n\t\t\t<div class=\"col-12\">\r\n\t\t\t\t\n<h1 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Research<\/h1>\n\n\n\n<p>My field projects include investigations of:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>long-term culture-climate interactions in the Chicama Valley on the north coast of Peru,<\/li>\n<li>the effects of landscape taphonomy on use of archaeological radiocarbon assemblages as population proxies in Utah\u2019s Bonneville Basin,<\/li>\n<li>landscape engineering that formed part of the early ceremonial complex of Chav\u00edn de Hu\u00e1ntar in Peru, and<\/li>\n<li>the environmental contexts of early experimentation with agriculture in Jordan\u2019s Wadi al-Hasa (at the Neolithic sites of\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.hemmeh-project.uni-kiel.de\/\">el-Hemmeh<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.neolithicsharara.org\/\">Sharara<\/a>).<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>My work on digital and quantitative modeling focuses on understanding the consequences of environmental change at human spatial and temporal scales.\u00a0 Using spatially-explicit modeling to integrate archaeological, geoarchaeological, and paleoenvironmental data, I work to understand both the effects of changing climates on human communities and the long-term legacies of anthropogenic environmental changes.\u00a0 My research in Jordan, for example, maps fragmented paleosurfaces in order to reconstruct Early Holocene landscapes, model early experiments with cultivation and domestication, and assess human landscape impacts in the early Neolithic.\u00a0 In Provence I use a variety of modeling approaches to explore the impacts of Holocene climate changes on potential agricultural productivity and use GIS and other tools to analyze settlement patterns for evidence of those impacts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n<p>Past projects include:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>landscapes of long-term resource extraction (at the Quispisisa obsidian source in the\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/mapaspects.org\/projects\/quispisisa\">Peruvian Central Andes<\/a>\u00a0and at the St\u00e9lida chert source on the Greek island of<a href=\"https:\/\/stelida.mcmaster.ca\/\">\u00a0Naxos<\/a>,<\/li>\n<li>development of methods for quantifying the damage done by looting of\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/traffickingculture.org\/data\/google-earth\/\">archaeological sites<\/a>, with test cases in Jordan and Peru, and<\/li>\n<li>exploration of simulated data to evaluate the use of summed probability distributions from assemblages of\u00a0<sup>14<\/sup>C dates as population proxies.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Research Support<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Ongoing Research Support<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>National Science Foundation Grant (PI with Brian Codding, co-PI) Collaborative Research: Improved Taphonomic Correction of Past Population Dynamics (Award 1921013)<\/li>\n<li>National Science Foundation Grant (co-PI with Ben Vining [PI] and Aubrey Hilman [co-PI]) Collaborative Research: Coupling and Cohesion as Factors Affecting Vulnerability to Abrupt Climate Change (Award 1847131)<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\r\n\t\t\t<\/div>\r\n\t\t<\/div>\r\n\t<\/div>\r\n<\/section>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"featured_post":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"class_list":["post-22","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/daniel-contreras\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/22","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/daniel-contreras\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/daniel-contreras\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/daniel-contreras\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/daniel-contreras\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/daniel-contreras\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/22\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":267,"href":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/daniel-contreras\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/22\/revisions\/267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/daniel-contreras\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}