Contact information:

shannon.tushingham@wsu.edu or 509-335-4314

Museum of Anthropology

Overview

This collection features scholarly work by Shannon Tushingham, assistant director of the Museum of Anthropology at Washington State University. Tushingham's current projects focus on the historical ecology of the southern Pacific Northwest Coast in collaboration with Tribal communities, an investigation of human use of psychoactive plants and development of residue extraction and identification methods, and research investigating Native American persistence and survival through contact to the present day. She has a broad interest in the relationship between forager decision making and environmental variability across time and space, and understanding how different adaptive strategies may alter these dynamics over the long term historical record. Guided by models from evolutionary ecology, this work involves examining some of the ideas and assumptions of interpretive frameworks that evaluate the productivity and potential of certain resources or environmental zones. Her research interests include: Pacific Rim hunter-gatherer-fishers, evolutionary ecology, ethnoarchaeology, archaeometry, residue studies, psychoactive plant use, colonial encounters, collaborative research and contemporary indigenous communities.