Peter M Yaworsky

Biographic Data

ID4052965
NAMEPeter M Yaworsky
GIVEN NAMESPeter M
FAMILY NAMEYaworsky
SIGNATUREYAWORSKY P M
AFFILIATIONSAarhus University
ORCID0000-0002-4620-9569
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS10
TOTAL CITATIONS23
AUTHOR COUNT10
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR2018
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2025
H-INDEX3

  • Environmental Drivers of Wealth Inequality among Ancestral Puebloan Farmers in Bears Ears National Monument

    Open AccessRoxanne Lois F Lamson, Kathleen M Wilson et al.ARTICLEAmerican Antiquity2025References: 19

    Here, we explore variation in a new record of archaeological house-floor sizes from the southwestern United States relative to spatially explicit time series estimates of local precipitation. Our results show that inequality becomes more severe during periods of high precipitation. This supports the theory suggesting that inequality may emerge where resources are dense, predictable, and clumped within heterogenous and circumscribed environments. …

  • The Goldilocks Zone for maize agriculture and the settlement and abandonment of the West Tavaputs Plateau

    Open AccessPeter M Yaworsky, Kenneth Blake Vernon et al.ARTICLEQuaternary International2024

    Between 2100 and 500 BP, maize farming spread throughout the American Southwest, driving changes in land use patterns and relative increases in the number of archaeological sites, which is commonly interpreted as increases in population. In the context of the Southwest, with its variable topography and limited water sources, the locations suitable for productive maize agriculture are limited. Higher elevation locations often have a greater abunda…

  • Here by the Sea and Sand: Uninterrupted Hunter-Fisher-Gatherer Coastal Habitation Despite Considerable Population Growth

    Open AccessVictor Lundström, David Simpson et al.ARTICLEOpen Quaternary2024Cited by: 1References: 61

    At the end of the Pleistocene as temperatures warmed, new habitats opened up to human occupation as the Fennoscandian Ice Sheet receded. Along the west coast of modern-day Norway, human populations of coastal foragers slowly transitioned from short-term settlement patterns in the Early Mesolithic (ca. 11,500–10,000 cal BP), to more lasting ones during the Late Mesolithic (8500-6000 BP) and Early Neolithic (ca. 6000–5200 BP) as climatic conditions…

  • The Fremont Frontier: Living at the Margins of Maize Farming

    Open AccessKenneth Blake Vernon, Peter M Yaworsky et al.ARTICLEAmerican Antiquity2024Cited by: 3References: 51

    The Fremont provide an important case study to examine the resilience of ancient farmers to climatic downturns, because they lived at the far northern margin of intensive maize agriculture in the American West, where the constraints on maize production are made abundantly clear. Using a tree-ring and simulation-based reconstruction of average annual precipitation and maize growing degree days, along with cost-distance to perennial streams, we mod…

  • Climatic controls and costly signaling: An integrated analysis of Holocene hunting in the Bonneville and Wyoming Basins, USA

    Open AccessD A Byers, Ryan Mcgrath et al.ARTICLEThe Holocene2023Cited by: 1References: 32

    In this paper, we explore and integrate different currencies that may underlie large-game hunting to guide a trans-Holocene analysis of variation in artiodactyl utilization using massive archaeofaunal data-sets from predominantly open-air sites from the Bonneville and Wyoming basins. The available empirical data continue to suggest that artiodactyls yield consistently higher return rates than lagomorphs allowing us to leverage predictions from bo…

  • Evaluating statistical models for establishing morphometric taxonomic identifications and a new approach using Random Forest

    Open AccessKasey E Cole, Peter M Yaworsky et al.ARTICLEJournal of Archaeological Science2022References: 19

  • Socioecological Dynamics Structuring the Spread of Farming in the North American Basin-Plateau Region

    B F Codding, Joan Brenner Coltrain et al.ARTICLEEnvironmental Archaeology2021Cited by: 2References: 33

    The spread of agriculture is a major driver of social and environmental change throughout the Holocene, yet experimental and ethnographic data indicate that farming is less profitable than foraging, so why would individuals choose to adopt agriculture leading to its expansion? Ideal distribution models offer one framework to answer this question: Individuals should adopt less profitable subsistence strategies and occupy more marginal environments…

  • Decomposing Habitat Suitability Across the Forager to Farmer Transition

    Kenneth Blake Vernon, Peter M Yaworsky et al.ARTICLEEnvironmental Archaeology2020Cited by: 11References: 16

    How might subsistence strategies structure the costs and benefits of habitat selection and, therefore, drive settlement patterning? We explore this question within an Ideal Distribution framework, arguing that (i) a habitat can be decomposed into its environmental covariates, (ii) their relative contributions to suitability can vary as a function of subsistence strategy, and (iii) the resulting differences will in turn lead to different populatio…

  • Fight or flight: An assessment of Fremont territoriality in Nine Mile Canyon, Utah

    Open AccessWeston C Mccool, Peter M YaworskyARTICLEQuaternary International2019

  • The Ideal Distribution of Farmers: Explaining the Euro-American Settlement of Utah

    Open AccessPeter M Yaworsky, B F CoddingARTICLEAmerican Antiquity2018Cited by: 5References: 42

    Explaining how and why populations settle a new landscape is central to many questions in American archaeology. Recent advances in settlement research have adopted predictions from the Ideal Free Distribution model (IFD). While tests of IFD predictions to date rely either on archaeologically derived coarse-grained diachronic data or ethnographically derived fine-grained synchronic data, here we provide the first test using historically derived da…