Mark Golitko

Biography

Mark Golitko is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, a Faculty Fellow at the Kroc and Kellogg Institutes, a Faculty Affiliate at the O’Brien International Security Center, and a Research Associate at the Field Museum of Natural History. He earned a Bachelor of Science (1999, with distinction) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he studied Physics, Astronomy, Mathematics, and Medieval History. He earned a Master of Arts (2002) and a PhD (2010) in Anthropology from the University of Illinois at Chicago. His field, laboratory, and museum research has spanned several world regions, including Europe, the Southwestern Pacific, South America, and Mesoamerica. Since 2011, he has conducted fieldwork on the northern coast of Papua New Guinea, exploring how people there dealt with past periods of rapid climatic and environmental change, which may be analogous to those anticipated to result from global climate change in coming centuries. Originally trained as a European prehistorian, his work on the Neolithic period explores drivers of inter-community violence in the context of early agriculture, rapid population growth, and climatic variability. His current field project, the Körös Neolithic Archaeology Project (KNAP) in Békés county, eastern Hungary, examines settlement growth and aggregation at Middle Neolithic (~5600-5000 BC) communities on the Great Hungarian Plain. He directs the Notre Dame Archaeological X-ray Laboratory (NDAXL), which houses instrumentation for compositional analysis of archaeological and paleoenvironmental samples. He is the author of the books LBK Realpolitik (Archaeopress, 2015) and Modeling the Past: Archaeology, History, and Dynamic Networks (Berghahn, 2023) as well as numerous articles and book chapters examining ancient conflict, economy, social networks, human-environment dynamics, and archaeological scientific methods.