Mark Aldenderfer

This biography of a living person needs additional citations for verification.

Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living
persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately,
especially if potentially libelous or harmful.

Mark S. Aldenderfer (born 1950) is an American anthropologist and

archaeologist. He is the MacArthur Professor of Anthropology at the
University of California, Merced where he was previously the Dean of the
School of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts. He has served as Professor
of Anthropology at the University of Arizona, and the University of
California, Santa Barbara. Aldenderfer received his Ph.D. from Penn State
University in 1977. He is known in particular for his comparative research
into high-altitude adaptation, and for contributions to quantitative methods in
archaeology. He has also served as editor of several journals in anthropology
and archaeology.

Research contributions
His research themes include the origins of settled village life, human
adaptation to high altitude environments, hunting and gathering, and early
plant and animal domestication. Aldenderfer has made important contributions
to understanding the Archaic and Formative period peoples of the south-
central Andes through active field projects in southern Peru. He has directed
excavation projects at the sites of Asana, Qillqatani, and Jisk'a Iru Muqu, and
survey projects in the Osmore valley (Moquegua, Peru) and in river valleys in
the Lake Titicaca Basin. Since 1997 he has also conducted research on
Buddhist and pre-Buddhist occupations in the Himalaya through field research
in far western Tibet. He has also done fieldwork in Mesoamerica, Ethiopia,
and in the United States.

Editorial work
From 2008-2018, Aldenderfer served in the role of editor-in-chief for the
journal Current Anthropology.[1] He has served as the editor of Latin
American Antiquity and the Society for American Archaeology Bulletin (now
the SAA Archaeological Record).

Major publications
Aldenderfer, Mark S.; Roger K. Blashfield (1984). Cluster Analysis. Beverly
Hills, CA: Sage Publications. ISBN 0-8039-2376-7.
Aldenderfer, Mark S. (1993). "Ritual, Hierarchy, and Change in Foraging
Societies". Journal of Anthropological Archaeology. 12 (1): 1–40.
doi:10.1006/jaar.1993.1001.
Aldenderfer, Mark S. (1998). Montane Foragers: Asana and the south-central
Andean Archaic. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. ISBN 0-87745-621-6.
Aldenderfer, Mark S. (1999). "The Pleistocene/Holocene transition in Peru
and its effects upon human use of the landscape". Quaternary International.
53–4: 11–19. Bibcode:1999QuInt..53...11A. doi:10.1016/s1040-
6182(98)00004-4.
Aldenderfer, Mark S. (2003). "Moving Up in the World: Archaeologists seek
to understand how and when people came to occupy the Andean and Tibetan
plateaus". American Scientist. 91 (6): 542–550. doi:10.1511/2003.6.542.
Aldenderfer, Mark (2006). "Modelling Plateau Peoples: The early human use
of the world's high plateaux". World Archaeology. 38 (3): 357–370.
doi:10.1080/00438240600813285. S2CID 162378292.
Aldenderfer, Mark; Craig, N.; Speakman, R. J.; Popelka-Filcoff, R. S. (2008).
"4000-year Old Gold Artifacts from the Lake Titicaca Basin, Peru".
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of
America. 105 (13): 5002–5005. doi:10.1073/pnas.0710937105. PMC
2278197. PMID 18378903.
Papers on Tibetan archeology
d’Alpoim Guedes, J., Lu, H., Li, Y., Spengler, R., Wu, X., and Aldenderfer,
M. 2013 Moving Agriculture on the Tibetan Plateau: The Archaeobotanical
Evidence. Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences (6): 255-269.
Aldenderfer, M. 2008 On text, materiality, and the Tibetan Buddhist religious
architecture at Piyang: 900-1500 CE. In Religion in the Material World, edited
by L. Fogelin, pp. 339–358. Center for Archaeological Investigations,
Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.
Aldenderfer, M. 2007 Bringing down the mountain: standing stones on the
northern and central Tibetan Plateau, 500 BCE-CE 500. In Cult in Context:
Reconsidering Ritual in Archaeology, edited by D. Barraclough and C.
Malone, pp. 242–248. Oxbow Books, Oxford.
Aldenderfer, M. 2007 Modeling the Neolithic on the Tibetan Plateau. In Late
Quaternary Climate Change and Human Adaptation in Arid China, edited by
D. Madsen, F. Chen, and X. Gao. Developments in Quaternary Science, Vol.
9. pp. 149–161. Elsevier, Amsterdam.
Aldenderfer, M. 2006 Modeling plateau peoples: The early human use of the
world's high plateaux. World Archaeology.38(3): 357-370.
Aldenderfer, M. 2006 Defining Zhang zhung ethnicity: An archaeological
perspective from far western Tibet. In Western Tibet and the Western
Himalayas: Essays on History, Literature, Art, and Archaeology. Proceedings
of the Tenth IATS, edited by Amy Heller and Giacomella Orofino, pp 1–21.
Brill, Leiden.
Aldenderfer, M. 2005 Caves as sacred places on the Tibetan plateau.
Expedition.47(3): 8-13. (Also published in Portuguese in the Journal of the
Brazilian Speleological Society, 2006)
Aldenderfer, M. and H. Moyes 2005 The Valley of the Eagle: Zhang-zhung,
Kyunglung, and the pre-Buddhist sites of far western Tibet. Expedition 47(2):
28-34.
Aldenderfer, M. and Y. Zhang 2004 The prehistory of the Tibetan plateau to
the 7th C. AD: Perspectives and research from China and the West since 1950.
Journal of World Prehistory 18(1): 1-55.
Aldenderfer, M. and H. Moyes 2004. Excavations at Dindun, a pre-Buddhist
village site in far western Tibet. In Proceedings of the First International
Conference on Tibetan Archaeology and Art, edited by Huo Wei and Li
Yongxian, pp. 47–69. Center for Tibetan Studies, Sichuan University,
Chengdu, China
Aldenderfer, M. 2003. Moving up in the world. American Scientist 91: 542-
549. (also published in French in Spektrum de Wissenschaft, 2004)
Aldenderfer, M. 2003 Domestic rdo-ring? A new class of standing stone from
the Tibetan plateau. Tibet Journal 28 (1&2): 3-20.
Aldenderfer, M. 2001 Piyang: A 10th/11th C A.D. Tibetan Buddhist temple
and monastic complex in far western Tibet. Archaeology, Ethnology, and
Anthropology of Eurasia. 4(8): 138-146. (also published in Russian).
Aldenderfer, M. 2001 Roots of Tibetan Buddhism. Archaeology 54(3): 610-
12. (Also published in Year of Discovery 2002, Hatherleigh Press, NY)
References