Brian A. Stewart

Research interests: Hunter-gatherer social and spatial organization, Middle and Later Stone Age Africa; Evolution of adaptive flexibility; Mountains and deserts; Hunter-gatherer ritual and religion; Lithic, ceramic and shell technologies; Southern African foragers

Brian Stewart’s research focuses on the archaeology of hunter-gatherers in Africa, especially southern Africa. He is particularly interested in the evolution of the profound adaptive flexibility that is the hallmark of our species. Southern Africa is an ideal place to explore this because it has yielded some of the world’s earliest evidence for behavioral complexity on par with recent and extant human foragers. His current project, Adaptations to Marginal Environments in the Middle Stone Age (Project AMEMSA), investigates and compares human adaptive responses to three challenging landscapes in southern Africa: the Lesotho Highlands, the interior Karoo desert and the Namaqualand coastal desert. In each research area, he is conducting rockshelter excavations and open-air landscape archaeological and geomorphological surveys. The aim is to resolve when, why, and how humans learned to cope with challenging environments over the past ~300,000 years. By reconstructing the foraging strategies involved in learning to exploit such habitats within Africa, he hopes to better understand how our species was eventually able to colonize and rapidly adapt to the full range of global ecosystems.

He is also interested in the much more recent archaeology of southern Africa, where he invesitgates questions of hunter-gatherer and herder sociality, spirituality and interactions using excavated, ethnographic and rock art records. Beyond Africa, he is involved in research projects in East Asia and the Mediterranean. 

Before coming to Michigan, he was a College Fellow in the Department of Anthropology, Harvard University (2012-2013), and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge (2008-2012). At Cambridge, he was also a Fellow and Director of Studies of Archaeology & Anthropology at Homerton College. He obtained his PhD (D.Phil.) from the University of Oxford in 2008. Over the course of the doctorate he spent three years conducting analyses at the Spatial Archaeology Research Unit (SARU) of the Department of Archaeology, University of Cape Town, South Africa.

Affiliation(s):

• U-M Museum of Anthropological Archaeology
• U-M Department of Anthropology
• U-M African Studies Center
• Rock Art Research Institute, University of the Witwatersrand

• Adaptations to Marginal Environments in the Middle Stone Age (Project AMEMSA)

• Social Network Mapping in Ancient Africa using Isotope Geochemistry

• Karoo Pans Palaeohydrology Prehistory (KP3) project

• SPANning the Atlantic: Human Palaeodemography in Southern Hemisphere Drylands

• Redating the Southern African Middle to Later Stone Age Transition

• Mapping Ancient Africa: Climate, Vegetation & Humans (INQUA PALCOM/HABCOM Focus Group)

• Creating the 'Qing-Orpen Ecomuseum', a sustainable heritage venture in highland Lesotho

• Matatiele Archaeology Rock Art (Project MARA)