Kristin Cimmerer

Kristin aims to develop deep-time and long-term perspectives on plant and land use in environments that in evolutionary history have posed both unique opportunities and challenges to human subsistence, socialization, settlement, and mobility. She has previously explored this issue in the context of emergent agropastoral systems of the Zagros mountains using macrobotanical (carpological) techniques. 

Her current research expands these themes into the Middle and Later Stone Ages of southern Africa, and will employ new macro- (SEM) and microbotanical (starch spherulite, phytolith, microcharchoal) methodologies to understand how early modern humans navigated novel vegetation structures in the Namaqualand coastal desert and highlands of Lesotho