Project Personnel
Tim Kohler is an archaeologist in the Department of Anthropology, Washington State University, and the Senior Principal Investigator for the Village Ecodynamics Project. Originally trained in the archaeology of the US Southeast, he has been working in the Southwest since 1979, when he was drafted into the Dolores Archaeological Project by Bill Lipe, now Professor Emeritus at WSU. Since then he has continued to conduct research into the late prehispanic occupations of Southwest Colorado and also of Bandelier National Monument, in the northern Rio Grande, New Mexico. He is a Research Associate at Crow Canyon Archaeological Center and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, New Mexico. Some recent publications can be found at his homepage below, and in the Publications section of these webpages.
Mark D. Varien is Vice President of Programs at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in Cortez, Colorado. Varien joined the staff at Crow Canyon in 1987, where he contributes to the Center’s mission to conduct archaeological research, provide public education programs, and promote American Indian involvement in archaeological research and public education. He has been a professional archaeologist since 1976, conducting fieldwork in Guatemala, New Zealand, Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Washington, Idaho, Montana, and Oregon. He served as a crew chief for the Dolores Archaeological Project in southwestern Colorado and as a project director for the Zuni Archaeology Program, a Zuni Indian tribal enterprise in Zuni, New Mexico. At Crow Canyon he directed the Sand Canyon Archaeological Project Site Testing Program, which led to numerous publications. He received a B.A. in Archaeological Studies (1976 University of Texas, Austin), a M. A. in Anthropology (1984 University of Texas, Austin), and a Ph.D. in Anthropology (1997 Arizona State University). His current professional interests include the archaeology of the southwestern United States, site formation processes, household and community organization, patterns of sedentism and mobility, settlement patterns and the formation of cultural landscapes, human impact on the environment, social theory, public education programs about archaeology, and Native American involvement in archaeology.
Dr. Ziad Kobti is an assistant professor in the School of Computer Science at the University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada. He received his Ph.D. from Wayne State University, Michigan (2004), specializing in modeling hierarchical human social networks and cultural evolution. He received his B.Sc. Honors with a double major in Biological and Computer Sciences (1996) and an M.Sc. in Computer Science (1999) from the University of Windsor. He is an active researcher and lecturer at the University of Windsor and a researcher at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Wayne State University. Industrial work experience includes programmer/analyst positions on large scale corporate software systems and independent IT consultant. Profiled projects include a national award winning critical-time client/server and distributed database software solution for the emergency freight trucking industry, government funded civil and environmental engineering software, technial educator and corporate trainer in community college and industry.
A Diverse Team
The Village Ecodynamics Project seeks to understand ancient Pueblo peoples in their social and environmental contexts, a task that benefits from close collaboration among researchers from diverse disciplines. Alongside archaeology, computer science, ecology and geology, biomolecular science and economics play important roles. In the long run we hope that projects such as this will help the social sciences to overcome their historic isolation from biology, the earth sciences, and mathematics.
In the shorter term our agent-based models provide mechanisms for integrating insights from paleoclimatology, anthropology, and ecology, and provide expectations against which we can compare the always-surprising richness and variability of the actual historical contexts that we study in southwestern Colorado and north-central New Mexico.