My name is Gillian Wong (she/her), I'm an anthropological archaeologist who specializes in zooarchaeology, the study of animal remains in the archaeological record. My main area of research is paleoecology; I'm interested in understanding how past people were impacted by their local environment and the animals that shared that environment with them.
I'm currently an Adjunct Lecturer at the University of Texas at El Paso and am also affiliated with the University of Tübingen. I hold a PhD (Doktor der Naturwissenschaften) in Archaeological Sciences from the University of Tübingen, Germany, an M.S. in Anthropology from the University of Utah, and a B.A. in Anthropology from the University of California, Davis.
I'm part of international research teams based in Germany and South Africa. In Germany, I study the Paleolithic of Central Europe and explore how the relationship between humans and their environment impacted population movement in the past. In South Africa, I'm part of the National Science Foundation funded project “Developing a high-resolution framework to define human-environment interactions across the Middle-to-Later Stone Age transition at Boomplaas Cave.” On this project, I study the micromammals (like rodents and shrews) to reconstruct past environments from the Middle Stone Age to the more recent past in order to track the relationship between cultural change and local environment.
I'm part of international research teams based in Germany and South Africa. In Germany, I study the Paleolithic of Central Europe and explore how the relationship between humans and their environment impacted population movement in the past. In South Africa, I'm part of the National Science Foundation funded project “Developing a high-resolution framework to define human-environment interactions across the Middle-to-Later Stone Age transition at Boomplaas Cave.” On this project, I study the micromammals (like rodents and shrews) to reconstruct past environments from the Middle Stone Age to the more recent past in order to track the relationship between cultural change and local environment.
My career path has included work in academia, museums, and cultural resource management and has allowed me to also work with projects from Baja California, France, and across the United States. I have been teaching undergraduate anthropology classes for over a decade and am passionate about student engagement in research. I use my position as co-organizer of the Society for American Archaeology’s (SAA’s) Zooarchaeology Interest Group to provide resources and support to students in the society who are interested in the field. I also sit on the SAA’s committee for the Dienje Kenyon Memorial fellowship, a fellowship that supports women archaeologists in the early stages of graduate work in zooarchaeology.
