Grant Snitker, M.A., is a doctoral candidate in archaeology at Arizona State University and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. His research focuses on prehistoric uses of controlled fire, settlement history, and environmental change. Snitker approaches these topics through geoarchaeology, archaeological survey methods, GIS modeling, and landscape/fire ecology. He currently works in Spain investigating the origins and evolution of early farming communities (7,700–4,500 cal. BP) and how they used fire to create productive agricultural landscapes. Snitker also applies his knowledge of archaeology and fire ecology as an archaeological resource advisor on wildland fire incidents here in Arizona. He works alongside firefighters to protect archaeological sites from wildfires and potentially destructive firefighting activities.

My interests center around long-term human ecology and landscape dynamics with ongoing projects in the Mediterranean (late Pleistocene through mid-Holocene) and recent work in the American Southwest (Holocene-Archaic). I’ve done fieldwork in Spain, Bosnia, and various locales in North America and have expertise in hunter/gatherer and early farming societies, geoarchaeology, lithic technology, and evolutionary theory, with an emphasis on human/environmental interaction, landscape dynamics, and techno-economic change.

Quantitative methods are critical to archaeological research, and socioecological sciences in general. They are an important focus of my research, especially emphasizing dynamic modeling, spatial technologies (including GIS and remote sensing), statistical analysis, and visualization. I am a member of the open source GRASS GIS international development team that is making cutting edge spatial technologies available to researchers and students around the world.

Isaac IT Ullah, PhD, (Arizona State University 2013) Dr. Ullah is a computational archaeologist who employs GIS and simulation modeling to understand the long-term dynamics of humans and the Earth System. Dr. Ullah is particularly interested in the social and environmental changes surrounding the advent of farming and animal husbandry. His focus is on Mediterranean and other semi-arid landscapes, and he conducts fieldwork in Jordan, Italy, and Kazakhstan. His field work includes survey for and excavation of early agricultural sites as well as geoarchaeological analyses of anthropogenic landscapes. His specialties include landscape evolution, complex adaptive systems science, computational methods, geospatial analysis, and imagery analysis.