Kyle Bocinsky
Personal
- Full Name
- Kyle Bocinsky
- Project Role
- Graduate Student
- Bio
Kyle Bocinsky is a second-year masters student in archaeology at Washington State University, and a research assistant of Dr. Tim Kohler.
- About
Kyle Bocinsky is a second-year masters student in archaeology at Washington State University, and a research assistant of Dr. Tim Kohler. After completing his undergraduate work at the University of Notre Dame with majors in anthropology and physics, Kyle has begun focusing on computational modeling and the archaeology of the US Southwest. His responsibilities have included debugging the latest version of the Village simulation, documenting the code for public release, and programming new parts of the simulation to include the hunting and domestication of turkey. During summer 2009, Kyle will be joining a VEP crew for fieldwork in Mesa Verde National Park.
Kyle is also a fellow in the IGERT Program in Evolutionary Modeling, in which he is developing methods to correlate genetic matrilines of ancient turkey with actual turkey husbandry practices evidenced in the archaeological record. His research interests include early faunal domestication in the new world, agent-based modeling, complex systems theory, resiliency, and paleogenetics, all in the context of the southwest archaeology. Other interests include musical theater and downhill skiing.
History
- Member for
- 29 weeks 5 days
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.