Tim Kohler

Tim is a Regents Professor of archaeology and evolutionary anthropology at Washington State University. An archaeologist who works primarily in the US Southwest with interests in social dynamics, especially in the Neolithic, throughout the world, his research includes developing methods to understand the relationships among demography, violence, wealth inequality, social evolution, and climate variability. He is most well known as a pioneer in applying agent-based modeling to the problem of calibrating interpretations of what happened in prehistory. More generally he’s interested in the basic mechanisms for constructing knowledge about the past.

Tim received his A.B. from New College of Sarasota, Florida in 1972 and his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Florida in 1978. Except for brief interludes in Avignon, Besançon, Calgary, Kiel, Kyoto, and Santa Fe, his home institution has been Washington State University. He directed the Village Ecodynamics Project (with support from the NSF Coupled Natural Human Systems program) and a joint WSU/University of Washington IGERT called IPEM (IGERT Program in Evolutionary Modeling). He is a Research Associate at Crow Canyon Archaeological Center, Cortez, Colorado and was recently recognized with the Alfred Vincent Kidder Award for Eminence in American Archaeology by the American Anthropological Association. Recent books include Ten Thousand Years of Inequality: The Archaeology of Wealth Differences (edited, with Michael Smith) and Emergence and Collapse of Early Villages: Models of Central Mesa Verde Archaeology (edited, with Mark Varien). He is a Fellow of the AAAS and of the Washington State Academy of Sciences.