People

Joshua D. Reuther

Office: University of Alaska Museum of the North, Office 042
Phone: 907 474 6945
Email: jreuther @ alaska.edu

I am trained as an archaeologist with a strong emphasis on archaeological sciences and geosciences. I highly value interdisciplinary research within archaeology and anthropology, and working across traditionally non-archaeologically and non-anthropologically disciplinary frameworks. I am also grateful to be involved in several collaborative projects working with members of both urban and rural communities to understand the history and prehistory and development of landscapes in their regions. I spent several years working for a private cultural resources management firm in Alaska as a Senior Project Archaeologist and Lab Manager before joining the UAF Anthropology faculty, which provided me a background in cultural and heritage resource laws and practices.

My recent research has primarily focused on understanding changes in human technological, settlement, and subsistence systems within local ecological and environmental contexts in subarctic and arctic settings. I currently serve as a geoarchaeologist on the Upward Sun River Site and Quartz Lake-Shaw Creek Multidisciplinary Projects; both projects emphasize understanding changes in human-environment interactions over the last 14,000 years in the middle Tanana Valley in interior Alaska.

Other collaborative projects I am working on include:

  1. understanding the chronology and distribution of volcanic ash deposition in southcentral and interior Alaska, and its effects on prehistoric human occupations;
  2. understanding the potential effect of a marine carbon reservoir on radiocarbon dates produced on seal bone collagen that can result older dating offsets than dates on caribou bone collagen from the same time periods, over the last 2000 years in the Kotzebue Sound region of Northwest Alaska;
  3. characterizing the geochemistry of obsidian from Alaskan archaeological and geological deposits to identify the prehistoric movement of materials through travel to and direct acquisition from raw material sources, or through exchange with trading partnerships and networks;
  4. the analyses of archaeological data from a 2000 year-old collection from the middle Kuskokwim River, the 300 to 1500 year-old Deering collections from Northwestern Alaska, and the 12,900 year old Eroadaway site assemblage from the Nenana Valley.