Jesse Wolfhagen’s research focuses on human-animal interactions, exploring questions like “why did people domesticated some species but not others?”. To do this, he synthesizes faunal methods, quantitative modeling, and stable isotopic analyses to examine long-term trajectories in human-animal interactions. His research contextualizes animal domestication within broader ecological relationships, emphasizing the role of animal adaptations to anthropogenic environments and identifying factors that drove those adaptations.
Jesse is also an advocate for the use of more sophisticated statistical modeling techniques in archaeology, particularly those built using open-source methods. He is an active #rstats user and writes Bayesian models for his analyses in Stan. He is a co-founder and current co-chari of the Society of American Archaeology’s Quantitative Methods and Statistical Computing in Archaeology Group (SAA QUANTARCH) with Dr. Erik Otárola-Castillo and Dr. Max Price.
Prior to joining Harvard University as the Zooarchaeology Lab Manager in 2024, Jesse was a postdoctoral research assistant at Purdue University (2022-2024) and a postdoctoral fellow in zooarchaeology at the Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology (2020-2022). He received his PhD in 2019 in Anthropology from Stony Brook University, with a dissertation that examined human-cattle interactions at the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük (Turkey) and modeling cattle biometry across southwest Asia more broadly through the middle Holocene. He also received an MA in Anthropology from Stony Brook University (2014) and a BA from New York University (2011).
Relevant links:
ORCiD: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1354-4870
GitHub: https://github.com/wolfhagenj
Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/va7ye/