Reverse Engineering Intensive Agriculture in the Bolivian Amazon

The Middle American Research Institute at Tulane University is pleased to announce the seventh talk of our 13th Annual Brown Bag talk series by Dr. John Walker, Department of Anthropology, University of Central Florida. Dr. Walker is an associate professor specializing in archaeology. He received his Ph.D. in 1999 from the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include political and social organization, landscape archaeology, common poor resources, the relationship between nature and culture, complex societies and agricultural intensification in the Amazon Basin, the Andes, and Bolivia. Dr. Walker currently works in the Amazon Basin and studies how pre-Columbian farmers engineered that environment, showing that the pristine Amazon has in fact been managed and cultivated for thousands of years. He joined the UCF faculty in 2006 and teaches Archaeology of Complex Societies, History of Anthropological Thought, and GIS Applications in Archaeology.