W Christopher Carleton
Biographic Data
| ID | 5151984 |
|---|---|
| NAME | W Christopher Carleton |
| GIVEN NAMES | W Christopher |
| FAMILY NAME | Carleton |
| SIGNATURE | CARLETON W C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Simon Fraser University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7463-8638 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 29 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 13 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Bayesian modelling of the latent human influence field in archaeological urban sediments at Koh Ker, Cambodia
Reconstructing the spatiotemporal trajectories of massive ancient cities remains difficult because archaeological excavation offers temporal depth but limited spatial coverage, while lidar and other survey methods map urban form without chronological depth. Moreover, ancient urban dynamics were multidimensional and indicated by many different variables. Integrating archaeological and environmental proxies indicative of these variables into a sing…
Comparative Spatial Analysis Reveals Important Structural Similarities Between Ancient Angkor and Late Anglo-Saxon Hampshire
Angkor (800–1435 CE ) is considered the type site for “low-density agrarian urbanism”, a loosely defined archaeological label used to describe settlements with urban traits but dispersed spatial structure. Angkor’s abandonment from the fifteenth century has fueled concerns that low-density cities, now common globally, may be inherently unstable. The spatial distinctiveness of Angkor relative to other premodern rural–urban systems, however, has ne…
Making comparative archaeological and historical urbanism rigorous and open access through the URBank data platform
Adapting to a global urban future requires diverse, long-term perspectives on urbanism. URBank supports this by bringing together global deep-time urban datasets in a modern open-science computing platform. Its design eschews checklist definitions of cities, representing the variability of past urbanism and enabling systematic comparative spatiotemporal research
‘Wildland–Urban Interfaces’ from an Archaeological Perspective
The ‘wildland-urban interface’ (WUI) has emerged as a critical focal point of wildfire threats, human-environmental conflicts, habitat loss and fragmentation, and zoonotic disease spread in the twenty-first century. Urban interfaces with their environments are not a novel phenomenon, however. From the Middle to Late Holocene, diverse urban configurations and networks interacted with ecosystem dynamics, land cover, fire regimes, biodiversity, and …
Changing with the times
Past land-use reconstructions are a key tool for studying long-term human ecodynamics and addressing pressing questions about the origins and evolutionary dynamics of the Anthropocene. In particular, agricultural landcover reconstructions are vital for understanding long-term human-environment dynamics. Most past agricultural land-use models, however, rely heavily on modelling assumptions, make limited use of known archaeological site locations t…
Fire-human-climate interactions in the Bolivian Amazon rainforest ecotone from the Last Glacial Maximum to late Holocene
The Amazon Rainforest Ecotone (the ARF- Ecotone ) of the southwestern Amazon Basin is a transitional landscape from tropical evergreen rainforests and seasonally flooded savannahs to savannah woodlands and semi-deciduous dry forests. While fire activity plays an integral role in ARF- Ecotones , recent interactions between human activity and increased temperatures and prolonged droughts driven by anthropogenic climate change threaten to accelerate…
Mass-kill hunting and Late Quaternary ecology
Over 6,000 ‘desert kites’—mass-kill stone hunting traps constructed at various times over the last 10,000 years—have been identified from northern Arabia to western central Asia. It has been proposed that kites had a significant impact on animal demography, leading to changes in ecology and human societies. While there has been considerable discussion regarding the function and chronology of kites, their spatial distribution is poorly understood.…
Sum things are not what they seem
Radiocarbon-date assemblages are commonly used as proxies for past human and environmental phenomena. Prominent examples of target phenomena include past population levels and sea level fluctuations. These processes are thought to have affected the amount of organic carbon deposited into the archaeological and/or palaeoenvironmental record. Time-series representing through-time fluctuations in the frequency of radiocarbon samples are, therefore, …
Agent-based model experiments cast doubt on Dunnell’s adaptive waste explanation for cultural elaboration
Ancient monuments are puzzling from an evolutionary perspective. It is obvious that their construction would have been costly in terms of energy, but it is not clear how they would have enhanced reproductive success. In the late 1980s, Robert Dunnell proposed a solution to this conundrum. He argued that wasting energy on monuments and other forms of what he called “cultural elaboration” was adaptive in highly variable environments. Here, we repor…
Recent Major Themes and Research Areas in the Study of Human-Environment Interaction in Prehistory
We report a study in which we systematically reviewed the recent literature dealing with human-environment interaction in prehistory. We first identified the 165 most highly cited papers published between 2005 and 2015. We then identified the major research themes covered in the sample of papers and assessed whether the themes fall into clusters and/or vary greatly in popularity. Subsequently, we identified potentially important lacunae. Our revi…
A comprehensive test of the Locally-Adaptive Model of Archaeological Potential (Lamap)
Corporate kin-groups, social memory, and “history houses”? A quantitative test of recent reconstructions of social organization and building function at Çatalhöyük during the PPNB
A locally-adaptive model of archaeological potential (Lamap)
Sum things are not what they seem
Radiocarbon-date assemblages are commonly used as proxies for past human and environmental phenomena. Prominent examples of target phenomena include past population levels and sea level fluctuations. These processes are thought to have affected the amount of organic carbon deposited into the archaeological and/or palaeoenvironmental record. Time-series representing through-time fluctuations in the frequency of radiocarbon samples are, therefore, …
A locally-adaptive model of archaeological potential (Lamap)
Mass-kill hunting and Late Quaternary ecology
Over 6,000 ‘desert kites’—mass-kill stone hunting traps constructed at various times over the last 10,000 years—have been identified from northern Arabia to western central Asia. It has been proposed that kites had a significant impact on animal demography, leading to changes in ecology and human societies. While there has been considerable discussion regarding the function and chronology of kites, their spatial distribution is poorly understood.…
Recent Major Themes and Research Areas in the Study of Human-Environment Interaction in Prehistory
We report a study in which we systematically reviewed the recent literature dealing with human-environment interaction in prehistory. We first identified the 165 most highly cited papers published between 2005 and 2015. We then identified the major research themes covered in the sample of papers and assessed whether the themes fall into clusters and/or vary greatly in popularity. Subsequently, we identified potentially important lacunae. Our revi…
A locally-adaptive model of archaeological potential (Lamap)
Corporate kin-groups, social memory, and “history houses”? A quantitative test of recent reconstructions of social organization and building function at Çatalhöyük during the PPNB
A comprehensive test of the Locally-Adaptive Model of Archaeological Potential (Lamap)
Agent-based model experiments cast doubt on Dunnell’s adaptive waste explanation for cultural elaboration
Ancient monuments are puzzling from an evolutionary perspective. It is obvious that their construction would have been costly in terms of energy, but it is not clear how they would have enhanced reproductive success. In the late 1980s, Robert Dunnell proposed a solution to this conundrum. He argued that wasting energy on monuments and other forms of what he called “cultural elaboration” was adaptive in highly variable environments. Here, we repor…
Recent Major Themes and Research Areas in the Study of Human-Environment Interaction in Prehistory
We report a study in which we systematically reviewed the recent literature dealing with human-environment interaction in prehistory. We first identified the 165 most highly cited papers published between 2005 and 2015. We then identified the major research themes covered in the sample of papers and assessed whether the themes fall into clusters and/or vary greatly in popularity. Subsequently, we identified potentially important lacunae. Our revi…
Sum things are not what they seem
Radiocarbon-date assemblages are commonly used as proxies for past human and environmental phenomena. Prominent examples of target phenomena include past population levels and sea level fluctuations. These processes are thought to have affected the amount of organic carbon deposited into the archaeological and/or palaeoenvironmental record. Time-series representing through-time fluctuations in the frequency of radiocarbon samples are, therefore, …
Mass-kill hunting and Late Quaternary ecology
Over 6,000 ‘desert kites’—mass-kill stone hunting traps constructed at various times over the last 10,000 years—have been identified from northern Arabia to western central Asia. It has been proposed that kites had a significant impact on animal demography, leading to changes in ecology and human societies. While there has been considerable discussion regarding the function and chronology of kites, their spatial distribution is poorly understood.…
Fire-human-climate interactions in the Bolivian Amazon rainforest ecotone from the Last Glacial Maximum to late Holocene
The Amazon Rainforest Ecotone (the ARF- Ecotone ) of the southwestern Amazon Basin is a transitional landscape from tropical evergreen rainforests and seasonally flooded savannahs to savannah woodlands and semi-deciduous dry forests. While fire activity plays an integral role in ARF- Ecotones , recent interactions between human activity and increased temperatures and prolonged droughts driven by anthropogenic climate change threaten to accelerate…
Changing with the times
Past land-use reconstructions are a key tool for studying long-term human ecodynamics and addressing pressing questions about the origins and evolutionary dynamics of the Anthropocene. In particular, agricultural landcover reconstructions are vital for understanding long-term human-environment dynamics. Most past agricultural land-use models, however, rely heavily on modelling assumptions, make limited use of known archaeological site locations t…
‘Wildland–Urban Interfaces’ from an Archaeological Perspective
The ‘wildland-urban interface’ (WUI) has emerged as a critical focal point of wildfire threats, human-environmental conflicts, habitat loss and fragmentation, and zoonotic disease spread in the twenty-first century. Urban interfaces with their environments are not a novel phenomenon, however. From the Middle to Late Holocene, diverse urban configurations and networks interacted with ecosystem dynamics, land cover, fire regimes, biodiversity, and …
Bayesian modelling of the latent human influence field in archaeological urban sediments at Koh Ker, Cambodia
Reconstructing the spatiotemporal trajectories of massive ancient cities remains difficult because archaeological excavation offers temporal depth but limited spatial coverage, while lidar and other survey methods map urban form without chronological depth. Moreover, ancient urban dynamics were multidimensional and indicated by many different variables. Integrating archaeological and environmental proxies indicative of these variables into a sing…
Comparative Spatial Analysis Reveals Important Structural Similarities Between Ancient Angkor and Late Anglo-Saxon Hampshire
Angkor (800–1435 CE ) is considered the type site for “low-density agrarian urbanism”, a loosely defined archaeological label used to describe settlements with urban traits but dispersed spatial structure. Angkor’s abandonment from the fifteenth century has fueled concerns that low-density cities, now common globally, may be inherently unstable. The spatial distinctiveness of Angkor relative to other premodern rural–urban systems, however, has ne…
Making comparative archaeological and historical urbanism rigorous and open access through the URBank data platform
Adapting to a global urban future requires diverse, long-term perspectives on urbanism. URBank supports this by bringing together global deep-time urban datasets in a modern open-science computing platform. Its design eschews checklist definitions of cities, representing the variability of past urbanism and enabling systematic comparative spatiotemporal research
Archaeology and ancient environmental studies (10 works) · Archaeology (9 works) · Geography (9 works) · Geology and Paleoclimatology Research (5 works) · Ecology (4 works) · Archaeological Research and Protection (3 works) · Climate change (3 works) · Geology (3 works) · Physical geography (3 works) · Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology (3 works)