The Center for Human-Environmental Research (CHER) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit research institute committed to learning and teaching about the complex diversity of human relationships with the environment and the immense political, economic, and social problems facing humanity today. As human societies grapple with problems stemming from climate change in the 21st century, CHER conducts scientific research and ethical inquiry aimed at putting current problems into the contexts of both modern cultural diversity and the immensity of human prehistory. As an inherently interdisciplinary organization, our research bridges the fields of anthropology, sociology, economics, political science, philosophy, ecology, evolutionary biology, geology, and beyond.

While our research is mainly focused on Southeast Louisiana, our scope and interests are global, and our staff has worked on problems spanning the enormity of times and places in which human societies have lived. CHER is also dedicated to the dissemination of our research through a variety of outlets and public outreach activities. We produce open-access publications designed for use in Louisiana science classrooms. These publications are designed to bring awareness to Louisiana's environmental problems and their consequences for human populations. We make these and other resources freely available to Louisiana's schools in order to help build the next generation of informed scientists and policy makers.

Coastal Louisiana is one of the most culturally diverse and historically rich regions of North America, and it is widely recognized that local cultural traditions have played a crucial role in helping communities cope with disaster and environmental change at a generational time scale. At the same time, Gulf Coast communities face an extremely difficult situation in terms of socioeconomic problems related to storm surge events, coastal erosion, subsidence, sea level rise, and ecological degradation. Today, as disaster risks and environmental problems continue to multiply, it seems fundamentally important to build a better understanding of how the social systems of coastal communities have worked in buffering risk and enhancing community resilience. From our base in New Orleans, CHER staff are seeking to understand the social dimensions of resilience in Louisiana’s coastal communities and examine the process of resettlement from the perspectives of social networks, social identities, institutions, and attachment to place.

CHER research on coastal resilience is headed by our Executive Director, Dr. Grant S. McCall, and Director of Ethnographic Research, Dr. Russell D. Greaves. Combined, McCall and Greaves have over fifty years of experience in conducting ethnographic and ethnoarchaeological fieldwork across the globe. In addition to their experience as ethnographers, McCall and Greaves are also highly trained “dirt” archaeologists, and this experience has resulted in a detailed knowledge of alluvial and coastal geology and geomorphology. Therefore, McCall and Greaves are uniquely qualified in recognizing the geological basis of landscape features, as well as the dynamics that have shaped them over time.

The CHER staff is also working to understand and preserve the substantial history of human activities in the dynamic and fluctuating context of Lower Mississippi Valley coast. For thousands of years, prehistoric human groups have moved in concert with the evolving geological landforms and ecosystems of the Mississippi River delta. Immense and precocious sites like Poverty Point—an enormous mound village made by Louisiana hunter-gatherers more than 3,000 years ago—testify to the scale and complexity of human settlements in this region from a very early time period. More recent mound villages, such as the Buras and Adams Bay mounds in Plaquemines Parish, show the adaptability of late prehistoric and early historic populations that occupied coastal Louisiana around the time of European contact.

Yet, the archaeological record of the Louisiana Gulf Coast is existentially threatened by the geological and environmental problems of coastal erosion, subsidence, and sea level rise. On the one hand, archaeological sites are being lost with frightening rapidity as they are literally being washed away by processes of coastal transgression. These sites are virtually certain to disappear within our lifetimes, meaning that the priceless information they hold about the past peoples of our region will be lost forever.

CHER research on coastal archaeological sites is headed by our Director of Archaeological Research, Brian Ostahowski, our Executive Director, Dr. Grant S. McCall, and Research Scientist, Theodore P. Marks. This research team combines decades of field expertise in coastal and alluvial geoarchaeology, historic preservation, human settlement systems, prehistoric technology, and political economy. Thus, our staff is uniquely qualified to make inferences about prehistoric social and economic systems along the Gulf Coast while working to preserve archaeological sites for future generations.

CHER staff also maintain active research programs in numerous locations around the world. Our staff focus much of their research on the major desert of southern Africa: the Namib and the Kalahari. Here, our work has examined how cycles of aridity have influenced prehistoric human activities, including the evolution of our ancestors and the origins of modern humans. Our archaeological research combines concerns for prehistoric technology, animal bones and botanical remains, and symbolic systems. More broadly, our work combines perspectives from the fields of ethnography, ecology, geology, paleontology, and climate science to put the evolution of modern human populations into an holistic perspective.

How past human societies have dealt with cycles of aridity is crucial question, as modern populations in southern Africa face this problem more intensely than ever before. Furthermore, our work in this region has helped to show that many of the very features that we take as defining our species arose in response to Pleistocene climatic fluctuation on the margins of arid regions. In recent years, our staff have conducted archaeological fieldwork in the Namib Desert at the sites of Erb Tanks, Mirabib, and Namib IV. Our staff have worked with personnel from the National Museum of Namibia, the Gobabeb Desert Training and Research Centre, and the University of Namibia.

CHER staff also maintain other research programs at sites in the Unites States and around the world. These projects include the following:

• The origins and ecology of complex societies in the Southeastern and Southwestern U.S.

• The earliest human settlement of the New World

• Hunter-gatherer variability in Southern Africa, North America, and South America

• The transition from foraging to farming in the British Isles

• Technology and trade among the ancient Olmec and Maya

• Neanderthal life ways in Eurasia

• Global traditions of hunter-gatherer rock art