

Jade d’Alpoim Guedes is an Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Her work combines climate science, archaeobotany, computational modelling and agronomy to understand how humans in high altitude and marginal environments have adapted to and can adapt to climate change. d’Alpoim Guedes’ primary region of focus is Asia, where she has worked extensively in China, but also in Nepal, Thailand and Pakistan. Dr. d’Alpoim Guedes works closely with crop scientists to examine the potential of landraces of traditional crops such as millet, wheat, barley and buckwheat for modern agricultural systems. She grew up on a small organic farm in Portugal where she saved hundreds of local varieties seeds with her father.
Understanding how humans have managed to maintain food security while dealing with climatic change is crucial in a rapidly changing world. However, human adaptive responses to periodic fluctuations in local environment over the long term are poorly understood. Even more crucial is understanding how humans responded to climatic change, not in the few optimal areas of the world, but rather in key marginal loci where the livelihoods of millions of smallholder farmers and pastoralists are at stake. Dr. D’Alpoim Guedes leads an international collaborative fieldwork project in the Jiuzhaigou National Park of the Eastern Tibetan Plateau. This project aims to understand how Tibetans overcame challenges of past climate and developed the resilient systems of farming and pastoralism we know in the region today. With its location in one of the most biodiverse regions on the planet, the Eastern Tibetan plateau contains important lessons for understanding that the deep past of human activity has played in maintaining biodiversity. Current work suggests that contrary to many current conservation narratives that views humans as harming biodiversity in the region, Tibetans have contributed to the maintenance of plant and animal biodiversity on the plateau through millennia of ecosystem entanglements.
Dr. D’Alpoim Guedes teaches Feeding the World(ANAR 146) Environmental Archaeology (ANAR/SIO 166) and Paleoethnobotany (ANAR/SIO 576).
A video clip about her research.
A link to her website.
Thomas Evan Levy, Distinguished Professor, holds the Norma Kershaw Chair in the Archaeology of Ancient Israel and Neighboring Lands at the University of California, San Diego. He is a member of the Department of Anthropology and co-director of the Scripps Center for Marine Archaeology (SCMA) and director of the Center for Cyber-Archaeology at the Qualcomm Institute. In helping to launch SCMA, Levy has emphasized three approaches in his field work in Israel and Greece to explore climate and environmental change in the eastern Mediterranean: shallow marine geophysics, sediment core analyses, and underwater excavation. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Levy is a Levantine field archaeologist with interests in the role of technology, especially early mining and metallurgy, on the evolution of societies, especially in eastern Mediterranean coastal zones. Most recently, Levy’s lab group focuses on paleoenvironmental change during the Neolithic periods off the Carmel coast in Israel.
Tom has published 16 books and several hundred scholarly articles in high impact journals, conference proceedings and more. In 2018, Levy was awarded a doctor of philosophical sciences, honors causa at Charles University in the Czech Republic. Springer academic press published his recent edited volumes - Heritage and Archaeology in the Digital Age: Acquisition, Curation, and Dissemination of Spatial Cultural Heritage Data (2017), and Cyber-Archaeology and Grand Narratives: Digital Technology and Deep-Time Perspectives on Culture Change in the Middle East (2018).
Most recently, the Koret Foundation (San Francisco) awarded SCMA, $1.3 million for a 3-year global scientific collaboration concerning deep-time climate and environmental change with the University of Haifa, for which Tom serves as PI. To help jump-start SCMA, Levy is leading a trans-Mediterranean land and sea study of climate, environmental and deep-time culture change in Greece with Prof. George Papatheodorou and Prof. Maria Geraga, University of Patras, and in Israel with Prof. Assaf Yasur-Landau, Director, University of Haifa’s Recanati Institute for Maritime Studies.
Isabel Rivera-Collazo is Assistant Professor on Biological, Ecological and Human Adaptations to Climate Change at the Department of Anthropology and Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and Directs the SIO Human Ecology Laboratory. Prof. Rivera-Collazo is native to Borikén (Puerto Rico). Her work combines earth sciences, archaeology and marine ecology to understand social vulnerability to climate and environmental change, in particular through food and habitat security in coastal and marine areas. Through geoarchaeology and archaeomalacology, Prof. Rivera-Collazo works to identify lessons from the past that are relevant to communities in the present. Her research project DUNAS, combines sand dune restoration, cultural heritage and climate change to stimulate community resilience.
Most recently Prof. Rivera-Collazo leads the California Heritage Climate Vulnerability Index research project together with the CA State Historic Preservation Office. This project seeks to understand the multiple definitions of site importance, and the interface between cultural significance, climate hazards threatening heritage, and prioritization of action to mitigate climate-related impacts. Rivera-Collazo works with the Borikua / Taino communities in Puerto Rico and the Tongva community of Catalina Island in California. Her work highlights the importance of building horizontal partnerships with indigenous communities through citizen science and communal archaeology. Her practice emphasizes collaboration to identify community-relevant research questions, where the recovery of past knowledge can help decolonize historical accounts and can contribute to answer questions and solve climate-related issues in the present.
She is a founding member of UCSD Climate Action Lab, and has been awarded the 2020 Climate Adaptation Leader Award and the 2020 UCSD Integrity Award. She teaches Archaeology of Climate Change (ANTH270) and Climate Change, Cultural Heritage and Vulnerability (ANTH109) among other courses for the Climate Change and Human Solutions Major.