Dan Plekhov

Background

About Dan Plekhov

I am an archaeologically-trained social scientist with over a decade of experience collecting and applying spatial data to study past and present social issues. I am trained in qualitative and quantitative methods, including field-based data collection, archival research, and computational analyses. My research has focused on the long-term history of agricultural practices and land-use strategies, investigating their enduring effects of contemporary landscapes and communities. I have conducted fieldwork and research in the United States, around the Mediterranean, and in Peru – in each context seeking to provide both a comparative and regionally-specific perspective to land-use histories. I am particularly interested in understanding the ecological and cultural context of different agricultural strategies and the circumstances that make them viable, enduring, and resilient. More generally, I am passionate about finding new ways to mobilize remote sensing datasets and spatial analyses to study land-use changes. My current research focuses on developing methods for detecting and measuring short-term cycles of land abandonment and reuse in the present to understand the motivations for fallowing in different environments and under different economic conditions. I received my PhD from the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University and am currently an adjunct instructor in Anthropology and Geography and Portland State University.