Professor 

Chester New Hall (CNH) 508 

cannona@mcmaster.ca 

Tel: (905) 525-9140, ext. 23912 

I have conducted zooarchaeological research focused on fishing and shellfish gathering subsistence economies. The results highlight elements of resource management strategies and adjustments to environmentally induced shifts in resource availability on the Pacific Northwest Coast and the variability and long-term stability of reef fisheries in the Pacific Island Kingdom of Tonga. My works shows the nature and extent of stability and resilience in long-term human-environment relationships.

Associate Professor 

Chester New Hall, Room 538 

dawnm@mcmaster.ca 

Tel: (905) 525-9140, ext. 27605 

Dawn Martin-Hill (Mohawk, Wolf Clan) holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology and is one of the original founders of the Indigenous Studies Program at McMaster University. She is the recipient of a US-Canada Fulbright award, Outstanding Teaching Award from the Aboriginal Institutes Consortium, and she has received grants from SSHRC, CIHR and the Ontario Trillium Foundation. Her research includes: Indigenous knowledge & cultural conservation, Indigenous women, traditional medicine and health and the contemporary practice of Indigenous traditionalism. She is Co-PI on a CIHR-IAPH funded NEAHR grant (Network Environments in Aboriginal Health Research), the Indigenous Health Research Development Program (IHDRP).

Associate Professor 

Chester New Hall, Room 534 

smorell@mcmaster.ca 

Tel: (905) 525-9140, ext. 23909 

Shanti Morell-Hart investigates ancient human-environmental dynamics and their translation into contemporary narratives about sustainability, resilience, and collapse. Her published research primarily addresses ethnoecology in ancient Mesoamerica, with a focus on ancient Maya, Zapotec, and Mixtec communities. She is Director of the McMaster Paleoethnobotanical Research Facility (MPERF), a center of study into ancient ecologies and environmental change over time.

Professor 

Chester New Hall (CNH), Room 537 

poinarh@mcmaster.ca 

Tel: (905) 525-9140, ext. 26331 

Hendrik Poinar and his group are interested in illuminating human and animal migrations into and across the American continents (South and North) through the terminal Pleistocene and into the Holocene. We are interested in how large mammals (mammoths, sloths, horse and bison) as well as first peoples  moved across space and responded to glacial, interglacial cycling especially during the Pleistocene/Holocene transition. At the tail end of the Pleistocene, as the continent adjusted to massive climate oscillations, nearly 80% of all large mammals went extinct. To what degree did climate and environmental feedback drive these extinctions as well as the interaction with migrating peoples and a rapidly changing environment? Fortunately, these migration and extinction events as well as environmental landscapes can be reconstructed using animal, plant and microbial DNA data extracted from macro, micro and trace-fossils as well as sedimentary DNA remains in highly specialized clean labs here at McMaster University.

Associate Professor 

Chester New Hall, Room 535 

yongk@mcmaster.ca 

Tel: (905) 525-9140, ext. 23907 

Kee Yong’s background is on the ethnography of the nation-state, with an emphasis on the memory literature, conflict, migration, and the legality and legitimation of the modern state. Drawing on these complementary theoretical currents, Kee has done research on communism and the sacrificed of the Chinese Hakkas in Cold and post-Cold War Sarawak and on the recurring conflict in Muslim majority provinces in Thailand’s far south. His research on Sarawak and Thailand’s far south focuses on the relationship between the construction of minorities – and thus majority – and on issues on violence, history, memory, forgetting, silencing, economics, and political formations. Kee Yong is currently working on a collaborative project, one that seeks to understand analytically the potential geopolitical and economic realignment under China’s Belt and Road Initiatives (BRI) across the World Of Ocean Shores, referring here to Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean that encompasses parts of East Africa and the Middle East.