Faculty Portrait

Contact Information

Name: C. Adam Berrey

Title: Assistant Professor

Office Location: Mendocino Hall 4014

Email: adam.berrey@csus.edu

Office Phone: (916) 278-6452

Mailing Address: Department of Anthropology, California State University, Sacramento, 6000 J Street, Sacramento, CA 95819

Office Hours: Spring 2022: Mondays and Wednesdays, 1:30—3:00 PM (and by appointment)

Research Interests

I am an anthropological archaeologist specializing in the comparative study of early complex societies, or chiefdoms. My research explores the variable development of sociopolitical and economic systems, and how these systems shaped, or were shaped by, the demographic processes of chiefdom populations. Once seen only through the lens of scale-complexity models (or the idea that larger groups of people must be more internally differentiated, politically and economically), we now know that political and economic systems varied in more ways than just their degree of differentiation, and populations in more ways than just their local or regional demographic scale. This calls for renewed exploration of the interplay between human demography and sociopolitical and economic organization, taking into account the full range of variation now known to exist. I explore these issues from a globally comparative and multiscalar perspective, and through the quantitative and spatial analysis of archaeological data. I carry out field research in central and eastern Panama.

Education

PhD, Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh, 2014
Advanced Certificate in Latin American Studies, University of Pittsburgh, 2014
BA, Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh, 2006

Selected Publications

Berrey, C. Adam, Robert D. Drennan, & Christian E. Peterson. (2021). Local Economies and Household Spacing in Early Chiefdom Communities. PLoS ONE, 16(5):e0252532. (view)

Berrey, C. Adam & Scott D. Palumbo. (2021). Survey, Shovel Probes, and Population Estimates: Studying Regional Demography in the Intermediate Area Using Subsurface Sherd Deposits. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory. (issue pending; currently available online) (view)

Drennan, Robert D., Christian E. Peterson, & C. Adam Berrey. (2020). Environmental Risk Buffering in Chinese Neolithic Villages: Impacts on Community Structure in the Central Plains and the Western Liao Valley. Archaeological Research in Asia, 21:100165. (view)

Berrey, C. Adam. (2018). Making Absolute Population Estimates in the Intermediate Area using the Area and Density of Ceramic Sherd Scatters: An Application of Regression Analysis. Journal of Archaeological Science, 97:147-158. (view)

Berrey, C. Adam. (2015). Inequality, Demography, and Variability among Early Complex Societies in Central Pacific Panama. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 40:196-212. (view)

Drennan, Robert D., C. Adam Berrey, & Christian E. Peterson. (2015). Regional Settlement Demography in Archaeology. Elliot Werner Publications, Clinton Corners, NY. (view)

Research Projects

Proyecto Arqueológico Bajo Bayano
The Proyecto Arqueológico Bajo Bayano is a multiscalar research project aimed at studying early complex society development and the social dynamics of raised-field agriculture in the lower Bayano valley of eastern Panama. This is the only region in Panama where raised fields are known to exist, which raises many questions as to why they were constructed here and nowhere else in the isthmus. Were they built to finance sociopolitical activities, as many models of complex society development would suggest, or were they built by autonomous households and local communities to bolster  their domestic economies? And what sorts of demographic, environmental, and/or economic factors might have been involved? To address these and other questions, a multiscalar research program was designed to document changing patterns of local and regional settlement demography, sociopolitical organization, and the organization of craft and agricultural production in the lower Bayano valley. This project, soon to begin its second season of fieldwork, is funded by a National Science Foundation Senior Archaeology Award (No. 1822066), on which I am the Principal Investigator.

Chiefdom Datasets Project
The goal of the Chiefdom Datasets Project is to understand the forces that shaped the variable development of the world's earliest complex societies. To this end, it has compiled, analyzed, interpreted, and compared primary archaeological data on the settlement organization, demography, public works, and households of over 60 chiefdoms from around the world. To facilitate comparison, analytical methods robust enough to yield reliable results from data that were collected and reported in different ways have been developed. Publications to date have compared up to a dozen regions at a time, delineating patterns among the highly varied pathways that chiefdom trajectories followed. Comparisons of even more cases are currently underway. I, along with Robert D. Drennan (University of Pittsburgh) and Christian E. Peterson (University of Hawai'i at Mānoa), am a Principal Collaborator on this project.

Proyecto Arqueológico Alto Tonosí
The early complex societies of central Panama have long been characterized by the strong levels of sociopolitical inequality that developed in the regions surrounding Parita Bay. These regions are crucially important to the study of sociopolitical development in central Panama, not to mention the study of early complex societies more generally, but so too are those regions where inequalities were weaker. It is it by comparing regions where different levels of inequality emerged that we can identify what factors may have promoted strong inequalities in some places, and those that may have discouraged inequalities from developing in others. To this end, the Proyecto Arqueológico Alto Tonosí set out to document changing patterns of regional settlement demography in the Río Tonosí valley, where only modest levels of inequality seem to have developed. This research, funded by a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant (No. 1048453), suggests that, contrary to many models of complex society development, regional population growth and other demographic patterns may actually have discouraged strong inequalities from forming.

For more information, check out my CV
or any of my online academic profiles:

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Courses Offered

ANTH 110: Archaeological Method & Theory
ANTH 121: Archaeology of Mexico




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Excavating landscape modifications in the lower Bayano valley (photo by Anny López)
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Multidimensional scalings of household artifact assemblages (from Berrey, Drennan, and Peterson 2021)
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Returning home from survey in the Río Tonosí valley (photo by Sergio Castro)