Jamie M. Hodgkins

I am an Associate Professor in Anthropology at CU Denver. I was born and raised in Colorado and thrilled to be teaching and raising my daughter in my home state.

 

Research Focus

For much of our evolutionary history, humans subsisted by way of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Consequently, I have largely focused on tracking modern human and Neandertal behaviors through the foods that they hunted, collected, and ate to examine how factors such as climate, landscape variability, and species/population differences influenced the subsistence strategies of early humans. Methodologically, I am a zooarchaeologist and taphonomist, which means that I study animal remains found at archaeological sites to determine how they got there and to reconstruct prey selection, carcass transport decisions, and butchering strategies used on the animals. I supplement traditional zooarchaeological methods with stable and radiogenic isotope analyses to estimate the mobility patterns of early-human prey species (e.g, European reindeer or African antelopes). Such information allows us to understand if early hunters were intercepting highly mobile prey or more sedentary species, and in turn, these analyses provide insight into the mobility patterns of modern humans and Neandertals themselves. In aggregate, zooarchaeology and isotopic analyses permit me to test hypotheses concerning the paleoecological context of modern human origins and behaviors and lifeways of our close fossil relatives (Neandertals).  

 

Research Locations

I have worked in Colorado, Wyoming, Spain, France, Italy, Bulgaria, Morocco, and South Africa

 

My research on the evolutionary history of both Neandertals and modern humans is focused geographically on Europe and South Africa. I have been a lead research scientist at the early modern human sites located at Pinnacle Point on the South Cape Coast of South Africa. In Europe, I have worked most extensively in France and Bulgaria, and most recently I have developed a highly collaborative excavation in the region of Liguria (northwestern Italy) at a new late Pleistocene to Holocene site called Arma Veirana (AV).

 

Research Awards and Collaborations

 

To support my work I have been awarded a National Geographic Waitt Grant ($15,000), a Wenner-Gren Grant ($20,000), and an L.S.B. Leakey Foundation Grant ($24,920) and competitive internal grants from CU Denver. To further research opportunities for students, in 2018 I co-founded a research consortium called HOMER (Human Origins and Migrations Evolutionary Research) with three other paleoarchaeologists (Jessica Thompson of Yale University, Curtis W. Marean of Arizona State University, and Naomi Cleghorn of the University of Texas Arlington). A primary goal of HOMER is advancing the study of modern human origins and migrations by collaboratively training students at each of our sites in Africa and Europe, teaching them the same methodology and allowing them to conduct comparative research on our collections. HOMER is currently funded by a $1M grant from the Hyde Family Foundation (awarded via the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University, from 2018 – 2022).