Support Page Content
STEM Scholars Lecture Series
The STEM Scholars lectures are designed for the general public. These lectures bring together area K-12 and community college students, faculty, and administrators; local business and industry leaders; CSUS students, faculty and alumni; and local community members to learn more about Sacramento State faculty research and scholarly efforts in STEM fields. The lectures cover a wide range of STEM topics from artificial intelligence to environmental sustainability issues.
Past Lecture
The Roots of Our Modern World: Archaeological Perspectives on the Emergence of Complex Society
Abstract:
Anatomically modern humans have existed on this planet for roughly 300,000 years. For the first 97% of that existence, we lived in small, mobile groups with only minimal levels of differentiation. But beginning around 8,000 years ago, we set about developing complex systems of social organization based on political hierarchy, wealth and status inequality, and economic specialization and interdependence. These developments facilitated the growth of the world’s first regional-scale polities, often referred to as chiefdoms, and in some instances laid the organizational groundwork on which ancient states and modern nations would eventually be built. Comparative exploration of how these early complex societies developed can provide valuable insight into the evolutionary roots of our own, modern world, and reveal how the forces that shaped early complex society evolution continue to shape societies today. This talk engages in such exploration using work carried out by the Chiefdom Datasets Project, a large-scale, collaborative comparison of early complex societies from around the world.
Bio:
Assistant Professor Adam Berrey is an anthropological archaeologist who specializes in the comparative study of early complex societies. His research focuses on understanding the interplay between demographic, economic, and sociopolitical processes as systems of organization based on hierarchy, inequality, and economic specialization were first beginning to emerge. Professor Berrey explores these processes from a multiscalar and comparative perspective and through the quantitative and spatial analysis of archaeological data. He has directed archaeological field research in central and eastern Panama that has been funded by the National Science Foundation. At Sacramento State, Professor Berrey teaches classes on quantitative data analysis, archaeological theory, and ancient societies of the Americas.
Professor Berrey has a B.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Pittsburgh. He is a Research Associate at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama City, Panama, and from 2017 to 2021 was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Anthropology at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. He joined the Department of Anthropology at Sacramento State in the Fall of 2021.