I am an archaeologist interested in the ways that people interacted with their environments and large-scale changes in human subsistence over time. I study the ways in which human choices and animal behaviors were affected by local ecologies and what kinds of social and ecological impacts these exploitation practices had. I explore these questions using faunal remains from archaeological sites—I use Bayesian modeling to reconstruct past exploitation strategies and multiple stable isotopic analyses on these remains to examine past animal diets and local paleoecologies. I use these data to summarize trajectories of changing animal biology and behavior that reflect changing types of interactions between people and local animal populations that underlie our definitions of domestication.
Jesse Wolfhagen
Zooarchaeology; Bayesian statistical modeling; Animal domestication; Niche construction; Neolithic southwest Asia; Spread of herding; Faunal identification methods; Stable isotopic analysis
2017 Wolfhagen, J. and Price, M., A Probabilistic Model for Distinguishing between Sheep and Goat Postcranial Remains. Journal of Archaeological Science Reports 12: 625–631.
2017 Twiss, K., Wolfhagen, J., Madgwick, R., Foster, H., Demirergi, G. A., Russell, N., Everhart, J., Pearson, J., Mulville, J., Horses, hemiones, hydruntines? Assessing the reliability of dental criteria for assigning species to southwest Asian equid remains. International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 27(2): 298-304.
2017 Brandt, S., Hildebrand, E., Vogelsang, R., Wolfhagen, J., Wang, H., A new MIS 3 radiocarbon chronology for Mochena Borago Rockshelter, SW Ethiopia: Implications for the interpretation of Late Pleistocene chronostratigraphy and human behavior. Journal of Archaeological Science Reports 11: 352–369.
2016 Price, M., Wolfhagen, J., Otárola-Castillo, E., Confidence Intervals in the Analysis of Mortality and Survivorship Curves in Zooarchaeology. American Antiquity 81(1): 157–173.