Lauren Pratt
Education
M.A. and Ph.D., University of Michigan (2024)
B.A., University of Alabama (2016)
Areas of Interest
Human-Environment Interactions, Peruvian Archaeology, Archaeology of the Eastern Andes, Computational and Statistical Analysis, Subsistence
Profile
Dr. Lauren Pratt is a postdoctoral scholar at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLA. She investigates early human colonization and the transition to food production in the tropical montane cloud forests (TMCF) of the Peruvian eastern Andes. Her dissertation work, titled "Human Ecology and the Early Prehistory of the Eastern Andes, Peru", focused on hunter-gatherer occupation of the Chachapoyas region in northern Peru where she co-directs a team of Peruvian and international archaeologists and technicians. Employing a combination of environmental and ethnographic survey methods, her work has identified sites with a history of continuous human activity dating back at least 5,500 years, an archaeological record unprecedented for the Peruvian eastern Andes. Current projects focus on the role of the eastern Andes in facilitating the exchange of goods, people, and ideas between the Amazon rainforest and the Andean highlands, as well as understanding the human past in the TMCF of southern Peru. In addition to fieldwork, she specializes in computational analysis, working with archaeological datasets to model archaeological patterns and past human behavior in the R programming language, employing a variety of formal modeling and machine learning techniques.