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Dixie West Kansas State University Phone: 785-539-2308 Email: dlwest@ksu.edu |
West graduated cum laude from the University of Kansas Anthropology Program in 1995 with a specialty in zooarchaeology, Arctic adaptations, and the Upper Paleolithic of Central Europe. The PhD thesis was published as the book "Hunting Strategies in Central Europe During the Last Glacial Maximum" in 1997. Her research showed that Epigravettian hunters living during the harshest phases of the last Ice Age selected, transported, and processed large game animals--mammoths, horses, reindeer--to gain the most returns. With funding from the National Geographic Society, 1996--1997, West analyzed animal bones from the Upper Paleolithic campsite, Dolni Vestonice, in the Czech Republic and demonstrated that earlier Gravettian populations were under considerably less stress than the peoples who lived during the full glacial period. She co-hosted a conference on mammoths which resulted in her 2001 edited volume "Proceedings of the International Conference on Mammoth Site Studies. "
Since receiving her PhD, West has focused her research in the Aleutian Islands, Alaska. Between 1997 and 2003, with funding from the Office of Polar Programs, National Science Foundation, she co-directed an international team of researchers to determine prehistoric Aleut lifeways and interactions with the subarctic environment. The monograph "The People at the End of the World: The Archaeology and Paleoecology of Shemya Island" will be published during 2005 by the Alaska Anthropological Association book series.
With current NSF funding, West is initiating a new phase of Arctic research. This project and its international, interdisciplinary research team will address coupled natural and human systems in the Central Aleutian Islands during the Holocene, beginning withe the archaeology, paleobiology and paleoenvironment of Adak Island. Study of the Central Aleutians is necessary in order to achieve a comprehensive, synthetic knowledge about human cultures, prehistoric biodiversity, climate and geophysical change, ecological variation and coupled natural and human systems across the longest archipelago in the world.
In 2003, West, in collaboration with the Biodiversity Research Center, at the University of Kansas, hosted an NSF funded international workshop on Ecocultural Niche Modelling. This study seeks to apply Old and New World archaeological data sets into a variety of modelling regimes that have proven successful using biological data. A second international workshop is scheduled for September, 2005 in Les Eyzies, France. This workshop is the first anthropological research program jointly sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the European Scientific Union.