Carl Philipp Lipo

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Associate Dean at Binghamton University

Cultural transmission models are coming to the fore in explaining increases in the Paleolithic toolkit richness and diversity. Analyses suggest that diversity increased due to relaxation of conformism, due to the effects of demographic expansion on cultural diversity, and the effects of extinction and recolonization in metapopulations. During the P...

The failure to account for temporal and spatial contingencies leads to attempts to apply universals to the needs and constraints of communities that may or may not be appropriate. Here, we argue that taking a place-based approach offers a way of incorporating local context to solve issues of sustainability at the scale of communities. We demonstrat...

Communities in resource-poor areas face health, food production, sustainability, and overall survival challenges. Consequently, they are commonly featured in global debates surrounding societal collapse. Rapa Nui (Easter Island) is often used as an example of how overexploitation of limited resources resulted in a catastrophic population collapse....

Tracking long term-trends in human behavior, particularly material culture, has long been recognized as a strength of archaeological studies. In the 1800s and a good portion of the 1900s, a major focus of archaeological studies centered on tracing large-scale changes in material culture over large geographic regions. The focus was generally on phen...

For over 100 years, Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile) has presented a challenge to researchers seeking to explain how nearly 1000 multi-ton statues carved and transported across this tiny and remote island by a population that, at least at the time of European observation in the eighteenth century, were no more than a few thousand in number. Adding t...

The history of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) has long been framed as a parable for how societies can fail catastrophically due to the selfish actions of individuals and a failure to wisely manage common-pool resources. While originating in the interpretations made by 18th-century visitors to the island, 20th-century scholars recast this narrative as a "...

Among archaeologists using remote sensing there is tremendous potential for the use of deep learning models for the prospection of archaeological features. The need for relatively large training datasets, technical expertise, and computational requirements, however, has slowed the adoption of these techniques. Here, we train a series of deep earnin...

In the mid-Holocene (5000-3000 cal B.P.), Native American groups constructed shell rings, a type of circular midden, in coastal areas of the American Southeast. These deposits provide important insights into Native American socioeconomic organization but are also quite rare: only about 50 such rings have been documented to date. Recent work using a...

Submarine groundwater discharge (SGD) is an important component of many coastal environments and hydrologic processes, providing sources of nutrients to marine ecosystems, and potentially, an important source of fresh water for human populations. Here, we use a combination of unpiloted aerial systems (UAS) thermal infrared (TIR) imaging and salinit...

Examining how past human populations responded to environmental and climatic changes is a central focus of the historical sciences. The use of summed probability distributions (SPD) of radiocarbon dates as a proxy for estimating relative population sizes provides a widely applicable method in this research area. Paleodemographic reconstructions and...

Understanding how and why cultural diversity changes in human populations remains a central topic of debate in cultural evolutionary studies. Due to the effects of drift, small and isolated populations face evolutionary challenges in the retention of richness and diversity of cultural information. Such variation, however, can have significant fitne...

We explore how the combination of cultural heritage and present-day cultural affiliations influences the construction of the concept of sustainability at the scale of the community using the case study of Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile). We argue that overlapping affiliations—expressed through administrative culture, organizational culture, and pro...

In a recent paper published in The Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology, John Terrell (2020) objected to the proposition that islands can offer model systems to study human behavior and ecodynamics. He argues that a review of insular model systems in the study of non-human taxa is empirically flawed and theoretically incoherent and implies tha...

Warfare is widely accepted as a transformative factor in human history. However, as warfare is not inevitable in human groups, archaeologists must critically assess the empirical evidence for war and its importance in the past. Here, we reevaluate the culture history of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), often interpreted as a case of warfare resulting in s...

Archaeologists have struggled to combine remotely sensed datasets with preexisting information for landscape-level analyses. In the American Southeast, for example, analyses of lidar data using automated feature extraction algorithms have led to the identification of over 40 potential new pre-European-contact Native American shell ring deposits in...

Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile) presents a quintessential case where the tempo of investment in monumentality is central to debates regarding societal collapse, with the common narrative positing that statue platform (ahu) construction ceased sometime around AD 1600 following an ecological, cultural, and demographic catastrophe. This narrative rema...

The effectiveness of governance depends on the knowledge upon which decisions are based. Knowledge veracity is particularly significant when future conditions are uncertain. In the context of global climate change, communities around the world, including the residents of Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile), face tremendous uncertainty in resource avail...

Sustainable communities on Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile) - whether in the past or present- require good governance of shared and common pool resources. Whether managing communal land needed for cultivation, ground water, stones for tools, fishing grounds, cultural heritage, or tourism, governance structures must balance individual interests with...

A commentary on a response on a commentary on Puleston et. al (2017) Rain, Sun, Soil, and Sweat: A Consideration of Population Limits on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) before European Contact

Sources of drinking water on islands often present critical constraints to human habitation. On Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile), there is remarkably little surface fresh water due to the nature of the island’s volcanic geology. While several lakes exist in volcanic craters, most rainwater quickly passes into the subsurface and emerges at coastal sp...

In 2018, we identified over 50 new potential shell rings in Beaufort County, SC using LiDAR and automated feature extraction algorithms. Further analysis of this data has confirmed the archaeological nature of several of these deposits. This poster details further analysis of these features. We find that the majority of these rings are significantl...

In order to understand the impact of individual communities on global sustainability, we need a community sustainability assessment system (CSAS). While many sustainability assessment systems exist, they prove inadequate to the task. This article presents the results of a systematic review of the literature on existing sustainability assessment sys...

Explaining the processes underlying the emergence of monument construction is a major theme in contemporary anthropological archaeology, and recent studies have employed spatially-explicit modeling to explain these patterns. Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile) is famous for its elaborate ritual architecture, particularly numerous monumental platforms (...

Rock mulch. Zip file containing Euclidean distance maps for the minimal, medial, and maximal rock mulch classifications. (ZIP)

Freshwater sources. Zip file containing point shapefile of the locations of freshwater sources within the study area. (ZIP)

Rmarkdown. Rmarkdown file necessary to create figures and execute all statistical analyses. (RMD)

Ahu. Zip file containing point shapefile of image-ahu within the study area. (ZIP)

PDF of Rmarkdown. PDF file showing the output of running the R code, including results not presented in the main text. (PDF)

Survey area. Zip file containing polygon shapefile for our study area on the eastern portion of the island. (ZIP)

Marine resource locations. Zip file containing polygon shapefiles for marine resource locations. (ZIP)

Coastline. Zip file containing Euclidean distance map for distance from the coastline. (ZIP)

Supplemental table for: 'Davis, Dylan S., Carl P. Lipo, and Matthew C. Sanger. 2019. “A Comparison of Automated Object Extraction Methods for Earthwork Feature Identification in South Carolina.” Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, 23. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2018.10.035.' Additional data available at https://orb.binghamton.edu/ant...

One persistent archaeological challenge is the generation of systematic documentation for the extant archaeological record at the scale of landscapes. Often our information for landscapes is the result of haphazard and patchy surveys that stem from opportunistic and historic efforts. Consequently, overall knowledge of some regions is the product of...

The population of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) in pre-historic time is believed to have numbered in the thousands although typical perennial sources of drinking water (streams, springs) are nearly absent from the island. From the accounts of early European explorers, it is known that the people of Rapa Nui utilized brackish drinking water. Beyond this,...

The study of pre-contact anthropogenic mounded features- earthen mounds, shell heaps, and shell rings - in the American Southeast is stymied by the spotty distribution of systematic surveys across the region. Many extant, yet unidentified, archaeological mound features continue to evade detection due to the heavily forested canopies that occupy lar...

Supplemental Table for Davis et al. (2018) "Automated mound detection using LiDAR survey in Beaufort County, SC" Southeastern Archaeology, https://doi.org/10.1080/ 0734578X.2018.1482186.

Fecal stanols deposited in sediment provide evidence of trace human waste products and have been proposed as a proxy for measuring population change. Despite its potential to contribute to paleodemographic studies, the method has not been evaluated against conventional archaeological population reconstructions to determine its fidelity in identifyi...

The archaeological record of Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile) is noteworthy for its massive statues (moai) that were transported over long distances with relatively small numbers of people and minimal use of resources. Equally impressive are the colossal bodies of red scoria (pukao) placed on the heads of many of the moai. In this study, we use thre...

Rapa Nui (Easter Island) has long-presented a challenge to researchers seeking to explain the nearly 1,000 multi-ton statues carved and more than 600 transported across this tiny, remote island where Europeans observed a population just a few thousand in number. The stark contrast between the island’s impressive monuments and its marginal resources...

Structure from motion (SfM) mapping is a photogrammetric technique that offers a cost-effective means of creating three-dimensional (3-D) visual representations from overlapping digital photographs. The technique is now used more frequently to document the archaeological record. We demonstrate the utility of SfM by studying red scoria bodies known...

Supporting Information Appendix B.

Supporting Information Appendix A.

Objectives: The Rapa Nui "ecocide" narrative questions whether the prehistoric population caused an avoidable ecological disaster through rapid deforestation and over-exploitation of natural resources. The objective of this study was to characterize prehistoric human diets to shed light on human adaptability and land use in an island environment w...

In this chapter we outline the last major human migrations with the discovery and settlement of the Pacific Islands. The last phase of this expansion resulted in colonization of the eastern Pacific with more than 500 remote islands ranging from tropical, subtropical, temperate, and sub-Antarctic, varying in size and landforms, and comprising just 2...

Costly signaling theory (CST) explains a variety of elaborate behavioral displays as a consequence of competition over resources when the risk of direct conflict is high. Within an archaeological context, monumental architecture is potentially explained as a facet of costly signaling between individuals and groups. On Rapa Nui, CST offers an explan...

The ahu and moai monuments of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) are ceremonial features that served to functionally integrate the members of relatively small-scale communities distributed around the island 1,2. These monuments also potentially served as conspicuous and costly 'advertisements' of community competitive and cooperative potential 3,4. Described...

The use of multispectral imagery is particularly effective for mapping the archaeological record of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) due to the island’s lack of vegetation and exposed surface lithic features. In 2010, Flaws demonstrated that near-infrared (NIR) imagery can be used to identify “lithic mulch” gardens, areas of cultivation that are enhanced t...

The diverse island societies of East Polynesia are well-suited as models for comparative evolutionary analysis. Settled ca. 750 BP by a common ancestral population, colonists of the remote corners of the Pacific shared a pool of cultural traits that included commensal species, language, technology, and other cultural practices. Following colonizati...

Seriation is a long-standing archaeological method for relative dating that has proven effective in probing regional-scale patterns of inheritance, social networks , and cultural contact in their full spatiotemporal context. The orderings produced by seriation are produced by the continuity of class distributions and uni-modality of class frequenci...

East Polynesian populations are closely related both culturally and genetically, yet their islands are environmentally diverse. The common ancestry and strong environmental differences make East Polynesia uniquely suited to the study of divergent sociocultural evolution. Following human colonization, populations diverged in subsistence practices, s...

Disseminating what is currently known about the skeletal biology of the ancient Rapanui and placing it within the wider context of Polynesian skeletal variation, this volume is the culmination of over thirty years of research into the remotely inhabited Easter Island. Compiling osteological data deriving from Rapanui skeletal remains into one succi...

Traditional explanations of Rapa Nui history invoke environmental degradation and warfare to explain the ‘collapse’ of the island’s social and economic structure. One element in these reconstructions are the stemmed obsidian points known as mata’a, which some have envisaged as spearheads produced in the context of endemic warfare. Morphometric anal...

Hydrogeologically, Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile) is one of the least understood islands in Polysnesia. There are no surface streams, the soils are highly permeable, and the water table sits far below the surface of the island. One of the many mysteries of Rapa Nui is how the ancient inhabitants survived with so few sources of freshwater. Although...

Tool design is a cultural trait—a term long used in anthropology as a unit of transmittable information that encodes particular behavioral characteristics of individuals or groups. After they are transmitted, cultural traits serve as units of replication in that they can be modified as part of a cultural repertoire through processes such as recombi...

Frequency seriation played a key role in the formation of archaeology as a discipline due to its ability to generate chronologies. Interest in its utility for exploring issues of contemporary interest beyond chronology, however, has been limited. This limitation is partly due to a lack of quantitative algorithms that can be used to build determinis...

Session: Open methods in archaeology: how to encourage reproducible research as the default practice

Evolutionary and Interpretive Archaeologies, edited by Ethan E. Cochrane and Andrew Gardner, grew out of a seminar at the Institute for Archaeology at University College London in 2007. It consists of 15 chapters by archaeologists who self-identify themselves as practitioners who emphasize the benefits of evolutionary or interpretive approaches to...

Seriation methods order a set of descriptions given some criterion (e.g., unimodal-ity or minimum distance between similarity scores). Seriation is thus inherently a problem of finding the optimal solution among a set of permutations of objects. In this short technical note, we review the combinatorial structure of the classical seri-ation problem,...

The Dawson seriation of Nasca ceramics has long been assumed to be an accurate marker of temporal changes in the prehispanic south coast of Peru. We test this assumption by directly dating a sample of sherds using Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL). Our results suggest that while some phases of the seriation are valid chronological markers, ot...

We examine the diffusion of a successful and an unsuccessful innovation among hunter-gatherers in the western Great Basin, using a diffusion of innovation model. Modern and historical studies on the diffusion of innovations suggest that diffusion processes follow S-shaped curves, with small numbers of early adopters, followed by more rapid uptick i...

Mt. Trumbull is located on the Uinkaret Plateau in Northern Arizona and is among the most heavily occupied archaeological sites in the plateaus area. Pottery technology was developed during the Formative Period in this area by those known as the Anasazi or Ancestral Pueblo people. Moapa Gray Ware, a unique olivine-­‐tempered pottery type seen widel...

The application of phylogenetic techniques to the documentation of cultural history can present a distorted picture due to horizontal transmission and blending. Moreover, the units of cultural transmission must be communicable concepts, rather than conveniently measurable attributes, and relatedness between elements of culture often resides at the...

Explaining how the monumental statues (moai) of Easter Island were transported has remained open to debate and speculation, including their resource expenditures and role in deforestation. Archaeological evidence including analysis of moai variability, particularly those abandoned along ancient roads, indi-cates transport was achieved in a vertical...

Significance We present detailed geochemical and morphological analyses of nearly 700 spherules from 18 sites in support of a major cosmic impact at the onset of the Younger Dryas episode (12.8 ka). The impact distributed ∼10 million tonnes of melted spherules over 50 million square kilometers on four continents. Origins of the spherules by volcani...

Rapa Nui (Easter Island) has become widely known as a case study of human-induced environmental catastrophe resulting in cultural collapse. The island's alleged "ecocide" is offered as a cautionary tale of our own environmental recklessness. The actual archaeological and historical record for the island reveals that while biodiver-sity loss unfolde...

Explanations for beveled blade edges on projectile points have been debated in North America archaeology since the first systematic description of lithic assemblages in the nineteenth century. Debate has centered around two opposing perspectives. One views beveled edges as features of projectile points that cause them to spin during flight. The oth...

The Cotzumalhuapa Nuclear Zone (CNZ) is a Late Classic site consisting of three large architectural compounds linked by a series of stone-paved causeways and bridges. The majority of the site, however, lies beneath layers of recent tephra, leaving the structure of this settlement largely unknown. This study uses ground-penetrating radar (GPR) to ma...

It has been proposed that fragments of an asteroid or comet impacted Earth, deposited silica- and iron-rich microspherules and other proxies across several continents, and triggered the Younger Dryas cooling episode 12,900 years ago. Although many independent groups have confirmed the impact evidence, the hypothesis remains controversial because so...

Easter Island — the name is synonymous with mystery, intrigue of archaeology, and today an ecological parable of reckless choices and ruin. The hundreds of giant statues known as moai located on a remote windswept and treeless landscape cry out for explanation of what happened there. Easter Island, or Rapa Nui as it is known to the island’s native...

Groundstone plummets of magnetite or hematite are commonly found artifacts of the Late Archaic period in Louisiana. While often assumed to have functioned as weights for fishnets or as thrown objects used to catch waterfowl, relatively little empirical evidence has been generated to explain their form and features relative to hypothesized performan...

The archaeological record of Easter Island (Rapa Nui) has long captivated the public and archaeologists alike. The monumental statues (moai) are the most famous of the archaeological features of the island. Other aspects of the record, however, include platforms (ahu), statue (moai), transport roads, and a wide range of architectural features. Alth...

Mulrooney et al. (1) draw attention to a problem with our table S1 (2), which was unfortunately corrupted in transfer to PNAS (and has since been corrected). The actual database used for our analyses was free of errors (as their reanalysis has shown), thus, our results and conclusions remain unchanged (2).