Anthropology Colloquium: Amy Cromartie

Tracing Steppes: Agro-Pastoral Land-Use in Bronze and Iron Age Armenia

Amy Cromartie is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University.

Amy is an environmental archaeologist who focuses on human environmental landscape interactions in mountain zones. Trained as an archaeobotanist and paleoecologist, Amy uses macrobotanical and microbotanical remains from lake and archaeological sediments to reconstruct climatic and vegetation records throughout the Holocene.

Her research focuses on how social and political structures in mountain regions adapt to and enact change on their local vegetative landscape. Specifically, she studies how the Bronze and Iron Age communities living around Mount Aragats in today’s Armenia adapted their plant acquisition and agricultural strategies in this dynamic mountain ecological zone.

Amy received a BA in anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles and has received training in paleoethnobotany as a visiting scholar at the McCown Archaeobotany Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley.

In addition to archaeology, Amy has received paleoecology training at the Institut des Sciences de l'Evolution de Montpellier at the Université de Montpellier, and the Environnements, Dynamiques et Territoires de la Montagne at the Université Savoie Mont Blanc.

She is currently conducting pollen analysis on sediment cores retrieved from Armenia and is a team member of Project ArAGATS. Prior to joining academia, Amy worked as a Linux systems engineer.