Joel D. Gunn

Dr. Gunn is a professional anthropologist with 35 years of postgraduate experience in the field. His background includes teaching at major universities, administration, pure research, and applied anthropology/archaeology. His field experience encompasses cultures in the southeastern United States, Mesoamerica, Southern Europe and Cyprus. Dr. Gunn's areas of emphasis include global climate change as it affects local cultures, ecologies, and landscapes. He is especially interested in complex systems modeling of cultural change processes. He has published numerous books, articles, chapters, and reports on cultural change. Dr. Gunn has undertaken the study of modern global climate not only as an adjunct study to support anthropological investigations of local environments. Taking a long term perspective on modern problems, he is applying knowledge of current and past climates to the future of global environmental policy, especially as relates to sustainability issues. **EDUCATION: 1974, Ph.D., Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh--1971, M.A., Anthropology, University of Kansas--1968, B.A., History, University of Kansas

There are 30 included publications by Joel D. Gunn :

TitleDateViewsBrief Description
The Antelope House Basketry Industry 1986 1567 Basketry, as discussed here, includes several distinct kinds of items, including rigid and semirigid containers, or baskets proper, matting and bags.
Bajo Sediments and The Hydraulic System Of Calakmul, Campeche, Mexico 2002 3267 Maya Lowlands climate researchers have set aside earlier beliefs that Maya civilization flourished in an unchanging environment. Analyses of river discharge, weather patterns, lake-bottom sediments, and settlement patterns reveal a highly variable c...
Basketry and Basketmakers at Antelope House 1975 2575 Preliminary analysis of the large and somewhat atypical Pueblo III basketry assemblage from Antelope House suggests the possibility of isolating individual basketmakers and groups of basketmakers within the Antelope House population. Observations are...
Climate Change and Classic Maya Water Management 2011 1522 The critical importance of water is undeniable. It is particularly vital in semitropical regions with noticeable wet and dry seasons, such as the southern Maya lowlands. Not enough rain results in decreasing water supply and quality, failed crops, an...
Climate-Change Studies in the Maya Area: A diachronic analysis 2002 1809 The series of papers on climate change published in this issue are the result of the symposium “Environmental Change in Mesoamerica: Physical Forces and Cultural Paradigms in the Preclassic to Postclassic,” held at the 63rd Annual Meeting of the So...
Climatic change, culture, and civilization in North America 1981 3866 Analysis of modern climatic data suggests a pattern of response to global cooling for precipitation in Mesoamerica and North America. Also research in palaeoclimatology has defined a series of globally warm and cold periods for the Holocene. This pap...
The coming perfect storm: Diminishing sustainability of coastal human–natural systems in the Anthropocene 2023 168 We review impacts of climate change, energy scarcity, and economic frameworks on sustainabilityof natural and human systems in coastal zones, areas of high biodiversity, productivity, populationdensity, and economic activity. More than 50% of the glo...
Copperhead Hollow (38CT58): Middle Holocene Upland Conditions on the Piedmont-Coastal Plain Margin. 1992 1630 Excavation during July and August 1992 at 38G758 east of Jefferson, South Carolina, revealed an active Middle Holocene sand dune with buried Morrow Mountain and Guilford components on the lee side. 77e site is located on the upland margin overlooking...
A distribution analysis of the central Maya lowlands ecoinformation network: its rises, falls, and changes 2017 1208 We report a study of central Maya lowland dynastic information networks, i.e., six cities’ external elite ceramic influences, and how they reflect the decision-making practices of Maya elites over 3000 years. Forest cover, i.e., Moraceae family polle...
Emergence of Complex Societies After Sea Level Stabilized 2007 2488 Sea level rose rapidly from the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM, ~18,000 years ago) until it stabilized about 7000 years ago. A millennium later, the rudiments of early civilizations appeared. However, the factors that might have spurred the first ci...
Excavations at Meadowcroft Rockshelter, 1973-1974: A Progress Report 1975 8489 Meadowcroft Rockshelter is a deeply stratified, multi-component site in Washington County, Pennsylvania, The 11 well defined stratigraphic units isolated at the site span some 15,000 years of intermittent occupation by groups representing all of the ...
A Framework for the Middle-Late Holocene Transition: Astronomical and Geophysical Conditions 1997 1723 The Middle-Late Holocene transition around 2,500 B.C. is one of the defining episodes of regional landscape changes in the Southeastern United States area and throughout the world. Coeval cultural and climatic changes are recognized locally and world...
From Calakmul to the Sea: The Historical Ecology of a Classic Maya City That Controlled the Candelaria/Champoton Watersheds 2019 1021 The Candelaria River watershed of Campeche, Mexico, and Peten, Guatemala, has shaped millennia of Maya, perhaps from their beginnings and generations of archaeologists. This chapter reviews efforts to understand Candelaria historical ecology over the...
Geo-cultural Time: Advancing Human Societal Complexity Within Worldwide Constraint Bottlenecks—A Chronological/Helical Approach to Understanding Human–Planetary Interactions 2019 1201 The integration of feedbacks between Holocene planetary history and human development benefits from a change in perspective that focusses on socio-historical periods of stability separated by global-scale events, which we call foundational transition...
Global Temperature Stability by Rule Induction: An Interdisciplinary Bridge 1994 2732 Rules incorporating influences on global temperature, an estimate of radiation balance, were induced from astronomical, geophysical, and anthropogenic variables. During periods of intermediate global temperatures (generally like the present century),...
The Hitzfelder Bone Collection 1978 2615 The purpose of this study is to assess and re-examine the Hitzfelder Cave skeletal collection. In addition, a brief summary of the previous excavations of the cave is included. It is hoped that the osteological study presented will be of assistance i...
Horses Grazing: Point Function and Shape 2003 3786 The Horses Grazing site was located in the Sandhills near wetlands of the lower Little Crane Creek in eastern Moore County, North Carolina. It contained a full Holocene cultural sequence from Late Paleoindian-Early Archaic to Late Woodland. Of specia...
Impact: The Effect of Climatic Change on Prehistoric and Modern Cultures in Texas (First Progress Report) 1979 1381 The pages of this report contain an assortment of materials which reflect the status of climatic change studies at The University of Texas at San Antonio. The effort is interdisciplinary, drawing on'the talents of persons trained in geography, pre...
The Influence of Enhanced Post-Glacial Coastal Margin Productivity on the Emergence of Complex Societies 2012 5486 We analyze the dynamics of post-glacial coastal margin (CM) productivity and explore how it affected the emergence of six complex CM societies. Following deglaciation, global relative sea level stabilized after ~7000 BP and CM productivity significan...
Influences of Various Forcing Variables on Global Energy Balance During the Period of Intensive Instrumental Observation (1953-1987) and Their Implications for Paleoclimate 1991 2670 Consistent, accurate, and numerous measures of global scale atmospheric variables have been collected since about 1958. A time series of 30 years duration was assembled to investigate contributing factors to the global energy balance. The El Nino-Sou...
Introduction: A Perspective from the Humanities—Science Boundary. 1994 1893 The articles in this special issue range across such influences on climate as solar emissions, orbital precession, atmosphere, oceans, and precipitation, and generally approach, each in some context, human implications of these phenomena. The common ...
Laguna de Terminos/Rio Candelaria Delta Core: Conditions of Sustainable Urban Occupation in the Interior of the Yucatan Peninsula 2012 1993 Pursuit of a link between the collapse of Maya civilization and climate is a subject that has been revisited periodically for nearly a century. In the 1980s, we began to develop a climatic, paleoclimatic, and ethnographic model of horticultural prod...
La Trampa Atractor: Las sinergias de simulación y análisis de componentes principales en el estudio de redes sociales de complejos sistemas adaptativos de las Tierras Bajas Mayas 2019 260 IHOPE-Maya se inició en 2009 en el Centro de Investigación Avanzada en Santa Fe y formó una red de investigación laxa volviendo a convocar de manera irregular para talleres y reuniones. Tras la reunión de Santa Fe, se procedió a recoger un conjunto u...
Paleoclimatological Patterning In Southern Mesoamerica 1983 2661 Paleoclimatological and archaeological data indicate a strong correlation between atmospheric and ground moisture and the political and socioeconomic prehistory and history of the Lowland Maya.
The Political Geography of Long-Distance Exchange in the Elevated Interior Region of the Yucatán Peninsula 2020 79 The boundaries of ancient polities were not always marked by fortifications, natural geographic features, or unoccupied buffer zones. Fortunately, in the case of the Classic Maya, economic and political systems often were coterminous because commerce...
Prehistoric and historic settlement patterns in western Cyprus (with a discussion of Cypriot Neolithic stone tool technology) 1975 5180 Intensive site survey in the Paphos District of western Cyprus indicates considerable variation in preferred settlement locus from the early Neolithic period to modern times. Settlement data for each major chronological period are summarized and rela...
Review of Gaia’s Body: Toward a Physiology of Earth, by Tyler Volk. 1998 1074 In his 1989 treatise on geophysiology, Lovelock built on the holistic Gaian theory of global biological self-regulation to propose a physiological rather than physical perspective of the earth system. Of special importance in this time of burgeon...
The Sollberger Distribution: Analysis and Application of a Tool Reduction Sequence 1976 1489 On September 4, 1976, J. B. Sollberger gave a demonstration in the art of biface manufacture to the members of the STAA. Recognizing this as a veritable gold mine of lithic information, we Collected the knapping debris from this exhibition for subse...
Steep Shore, Deadly Environment: A Case for a Cultural Anvil Along the Unembayed Atlantic Coast. 2002 2990 In his physiography of Eastern United States, Fenneman divided the Atlantic coast into embayed and sea island (largely unembayed) segments at the Neuse River. The southern North Carolina coast is unembayed because of geologic uplift. To the north (i....
The Stones of Calakmul: Lithics and Other Technologies Among the Maya at Calakmul, Campeche, During the Late and Terminal Classic and Their Cultural Implications 2020 1055 This chapter discusses the stone artifact assemblage excavated from Calakmul, Campeche, Mexico between 1984 and 1994 under the direction of William J. Folan, Centro de Investigaciones Históricas y Sociales of the Universidad Autonoma de Campeche. Aft...