Daniel H. Temple, PhD

The early life environment and hunter-gatherers link contemporary humans to the past, present and future. Stress in the early life environment reflects systems of inequality that may be perpetuated across the human life cycle, and these experiences are recorded in skeletal and dental tissue. While the concept of a hunter-gatherer has roots in colonial binary oppositions to industrial capitalism, these populations engage in diverse adaptive strategies that speak to the establishment of sustainable communities.

My work on the early life environment reconstructs stress using incremental microstructures of enamel. I use these data to test hypotheses relating to the social and ecological contexts for growth and relationships between stress and mortality. My work with hunter-gatherers incorporates traditional bioarchaeological analyses with resilience theory and new materialism. I investigate questions surrounding the ways in which reciprocal relationships with nature are created and maintained in hunter-gatherer communities. These investigations incorporate measures of diet, mobility, stress, mortuary ritual, and biodistance analysis.

• Baikal Archaeology Project
• Late Holocene Biohistory of Alaska
• Reconstruction of Indigenous Lifeways in the Colonial Southwest