Alders Awarded NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship, Joins U of A Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies

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Wolfgang Alders

Wolfgang Alders was recently featured in a National Science Foundation announcement as one of 25 Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences postdoctoral fellows for 2022. Alders joined the Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences in September for the duration of his two-year fellowship, under the mentorship of CAST faculty member Carla Klehm.

Alders' research focuses on investigating social transformations in coastal East Africa over the last millennium. At CAST, he is using satellite remote sensing, environmental modeling, and archaeological field surveys to better understand the development of the urban center of Zanzibar, Tanzania, in relation to the rural countryside. He seeks to advance knowledge on human social and organizational behavior across a complex island landscape, especially as political and environmental dynamics impact how people live and interact with one another. 

In collaboration with CAST, Wolfgang plans to develop a methodological approach to studying settlement patterns and landscape change by using newly available, high-resolution, low-cost aerial and satellite imagery, and integrating it with historical, archaeological, and environmental datasets to model rural settlement at multiple scales. The development of geospatial methods for regional prospection on Zanzibar also has the potential to aid in archaeological and environmental heritage conservation across the African continent, especially in coastal and island environments that are threatened by climate change. 

Wolfgang joined the University of Arkansas following the completion of his doctoral degree in anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. For his Ph.D., he carried out archaeological research in Zanzibar that investigated settlement systems across the historical clove plantation region on the northern part of the island.

Wolfgang has visited the University of Arkansas before. In the summer of 2022, he participated as a Fellow in the Spatial Archaeology Residential and Online Institute, hosted at CAST and funded by the National Endowment for Humanities, which trains early-career scholars in geospatial methods for archaeology.