Stigler Lecturer David Madsen to Speak on the Peopling of the Americas

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — David B. Madsen, research fellow at the University of Texas—Austin and director of environmental research at Mercyhurst Archaeological Institute in Erie, Pa., will offer the third Stigler Lecture of the academic year at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, March 9, in Giffels Auditorium, Old Main, on the University of Arkansas campus. He will speak on “The Peopling of the Americas: Before or After the Last Glacial Maximum?” This lecture is free and open to the public.

Madsen is a specialist in paleoecology and the evolution of desert environments. He focuses his research on the arid lands of western China and Tibet as well as the Great Basin of North America. Current projects, which are as varied as these landscapes, include millennial-scale climate changes in the histories of central Asian and Western North American lakes, and the peopling of the New World before the last glacial maximum, which is the time at which massive ice sheets covered large portions of Earth, approximately 21,000 years ago.

He is the editor of “Entering America: Northeast Asia and Beringia. Before the Last Glacial Maximum,” the most up-to-date evaluation of how, when and from where this migration occurred. Madsen’s undergraduate degree is from University of Utah; he earned his doctorate from the University of Missouri in 1973. He served as the Utah State Archaeologist from 1973 until 1994, and head of the paleontology and paleoecology program of the Utah Geological Survey from 1994 to 1997, when he became the program’s senior scientist of environmental sciences, a position he held until 2002.

Since 2000, he has been a visiting research professor in the department of geography at Lanzhou University in China. He recently won a grant from the National Science Foundation to study and define the history of hunter-gatherers in North China and late Paleolithic-Neolithic transitions in North Central China.

The Stigler Lectureship, initiated in 1987, honors Robert L. Stigler Jr., a native of Pine Bluff who served on the faculty of Columbia University. After Stigler’s death in 1980, his parents established this lectureship to commemorate his career. The anthropology department in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences invites outstanding archeologists each year for lectures and workshops.