Mark Golitko

Mark Golitko is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, a Faculty Fellow at the Notre Dame Kroc and Kellogg Institutes, 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 Doctorate (2010) in Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

His field and laboratory research has spanned several world regions, including Europe, the Southwestern Pacific, South America, and Mesoamerica. His doctoral research explored how human social networks in early Neolithic Belgium changed in response to increasing levels of intercommunity violence.

For most of the last decade, 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. He is also a member of the BAKOTA (Bronze Age Körös Off-tell Archaeology) project, which examines Bronze Age economy and society in far eastern Hungary.

He is the author of the book LBK Realpolitik (Archaeopress 2015) as well as other scientific archaeological works dealing with ancient conflict, social networks, human-environment systems, and archaeological scientific methods.