Reflections: GHEA Open Workshop

On November 4-6, the Anthropology Department hosted an open workshop for the Global Human Ecodynamics Alliance (GHEA). As part of department's new blog features, we'll be highlighting student reflections and observations of events, lectures, seminars, and more. Kevin Gibbons is currently a first year archaeology PhD student in the Department of Anthropology. His research focuses on analyzing and interpreting animal remains from archaeological sites to investigate relationships between human activities, economies, and the environment throughout history.

Early this past November, the UMD Department of Anthropology hosted an open workshop for the Global Human Ecodynamics Alliance (GHEA). Formed as a result of a 2009 conference, GHEA is a collaborative, trans-disciplinary group of researchers and students that work on a variety of topics related to global change science.  In addition to supporting the work of archaeologists, anthropologists, and geographers in environmental change and the challenges of sustainability on a global scale, GHEA integrates education and community participation with policy suggestions and graduate student training to more fully connect the broad field of research being undertaken worldwide in an attempt to better understand human adaptability and responses to climatic shifts in the past with the hope of building better policy and public consensus to tackle similar environmental challenges in the future.

The University of Maryland has recently joined the orbit of GHEA with the arrival of Dr. George Hambrecht. By hosting the workshop on campus earlier this month, the faculty and students of the department were able to welcome and meet with researchers and fellow graduate students from across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Iceland, and Sweden working across the globe on a wide variety of topics related to environmental anthropology. I’m excited for this new addition to our research in the department and hope that we can continue to make UMD’s presence felt within the network of GHEA researchers.

I also look forward to situating my research as a zooarchaeologist within the larger questions of human adaptability to climatic change in the past. As archaeologists continue to refine our knowledge of human-environment interactions in the past, resources available through collaborative groups like GHEA can help bring together larger bodies of data to compile truly impressive regional frameworks.