Donald Butler
Don H. Butler is a geoarchaeologist interested in the diverse factors shaping socio-ecological resilience and vulnerability. His research uses micro-sedimentary archives to understand community centered histories of societal change, specifically focusing on relationships among resource production and management, land-use and mobility, habitat reconfiguration, and ecosystem engineering. Ongoing work in Eastern Beringia contributes to tracking human and wildlife responses to changing terminal Pleistocene parklands. These ecotones are a fundamental component of the entwined proliferation of cultural keystone herbivores and early northern societies deep into the Beringian interior. Don’s projects have included a wide range of people and settings, from Inuit mariners in the Torngats, Athabaskan caribou hunters of the Barrenlands, to Mesolithic fishers of Lapland, and Byzantine farmers in Negev borderlands. Collaborative research on the horizon is aimed at investigations of local environmental impacts related to transnational exchange along the Incense Road in the Negev Desert, paleoenvironmental change in the southern Kalahari, and the ecological legacies of First Nations agricultural niche construction in southern Ontario.
Teaching Interests
- Introduction to Archaeology: Theories, Methods, and Practices
- Geoarchaeological Perspectives of Human-Environment Dialogues
- Archaeology of North America
- Archaeological Science
- Heritage Resources Management
Research Interests
Geoarchaeology | Environmental Archaeology | Human Paleoecology | Habitat Reconfiguration | Ecosystem Engineering | Peopling of North America | Arctic Foragers | Dryland Farmers | Land-Use and Mobility | Resource Production and Management | Sustainable Archaeologies | Geochemical, Mineralogical, Micromorphological, Microfossil, and Biomolecular Proxies for Local Environments and Human Behaviours
Selected Recent Publications
Schmuck, N., Carlson, R.J., Reuther, J., Baichtal, J.F., Rasic, J., Butler, D.H., and Carlson, E. 2022. Obsidian source classification and defining “local” in Early Holocene southeast Alaska. Geoarchaeology 2022; 1–20.
Butler, D.H., Dunseth, Z., Tepper, Y., Erickson-Gini, T., Bar-Oz, G., and Shahack-Gross, R. 2020. Byzantine - Early Islamic resource management detected through micro-geoarchaeological investigations of trash mounds (Negev, Israel). PLOS ONE, 15(10).
Butler, D.H., Pickering, S., and Dawson, P.C. 2019. Archaeological investigations at the Ikirahak site raise questions concerning Taltheilei land-use strategies. Arctic 72(4), 413-433.
Butler, D.H., Koivisto, S., Brumfield, V., and Shahack-Gross, R. 2019. Early evidence for northern salmonid fisheries discovered using novel mineral proxies. Scientific Reports 9, 1-12.
Bar-Oz, G., Weissbrod, L.,… Butler, D.H.,… Boraetto, E. 2019. Ancient trash mounds unravel urban collapse a century before the end of Byzantine hegemony in the southern Levant. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116(17), 8239-48.