Christopher Jazwa

Christopher Jazwa, Ph.D., is Associate Professor and Undergraduate Program Director in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Nevada, Reno, where he also co-directs the Human Paleoecology and Archaeometry Laboratory. His research integrates human behavioral ecology and archaeometry to understand long-term human-environment interactions, focusing on island and coastal settings.

Education

• Ph.D., Anthropology, The Pennsylvania State University, 2015

Research Interests

Jazwa’s work centers on how environmental change and cultural factors shape human settlement and subsistence strategies. He employs ecological models—especially the Ideal Free Distribution and Ideal Despotic Distribution—to analyze settlement expansion, territoriality, and resource competition. Methodologically, he specializes in zooarchaeology, stable-isotope analysis of marine shells, and radiocarbon dating.

Current projects include:

• California’s Channel Islands (since 2004): reconstructing 13,000 years of maritime hunter-gatherer settlement and paleoenvironmental change.
• Cabo Pulmo, Baja California Sur, Mexico (since 2018): documenting chronology and human use of an understudied coastal desert.
• Loukkos Valley, Morocco (since 2016): applying ecological models to Classical-period settlement dynamics.

Recent Publication Themes

Jazwa’s 2020–2022 articles emphasize (1) refined radiocarbon protocols for early American human remains, (2) isotopic approaches to seasonality and paleoclimate using California mussel shells, (3) large-scale settlement modeling in Bronze Age Greece and Roman Morocco, and (4) archaeological evidence for ritual ingestion of hallucinogens. Collectively, these works advance methodological rigor in paleoenvironmental reconstruction and demonstrate the explanatory power of behavioral-ecological theory across diverse cultural and temporal contexts.

Laboratory & Team

As co-director of the Human Paleoecology and Archaeometry Laboratory (with Dr Christopher Morgan), Jazwa maintains facilities for zooarchaeological, isotopic, and GIS analyses and welcomes graduate and undergraduate collaborators interested in similar questions.