Jesse Tune
Biography | Research | Publications
Biography
I am an archaeologist who studies human migrations and the colonization of new landscapes during the Pleistocene and early Holocene. I earned BS degrees in Anthropology and Aerospace from Middle Tennessee State University (2008) and an MA degree in Anthropology from American University (2010) in Washington D.C. I earned a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Texas A&M University (2015) where I studied in the Center for the Study of the First Americans. I joined the University of Mississippi as the Director of the Center for Archaeological Research in 2023.
Research
My research focuses on investigating the relationships between humans and the environment. I have ongoing research projects in southeastern North America and the Intermountain West, as well as research interests in North Europe.
I am specifically interested in how humans adapt to new environmental conditions because of group mobility and/or environmental changes. I incorporate lithic analysis, geoarchaeology, and geospatial data with ArcGIS to explore how social groups respond to changing environmental conditions. When and how humans entered the Americas remain some of the most pressing questions in North American archaeology today. As such, my research into human-environment relationships informs archaeological questions, as well as human ecology, environmental change, and human geography, among other disciplines. My current research involves documenting early human occupation of North America, investigating the evolution of lithic technologies during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition, and studying how Pleistocene-age hunter-gatherers adapted to resource accessibility.
Human behavioral ecology theoretically guides my work in developing testable hypotheses using archaeological and environmental data. I incorporate unoccupied aerial systems (aka drone)-based remote sensing with more traditional field methods to document archaeological site structures and address landscape-level questions related to site formation processes and land use practices. Such methods allow me to unite information across disciplines and spatial scales. I link micro-level data (e.g., pollen in a sediment core) to macro-level data (e.g., stone tool morphology) to site-level data (e.g., UAS-derived photogrammetric microtopography) to landscape-level data (e.g., lithic source material least-cost path analysis) to develop a holistic perspective on human-environment interactions.
Selected Publications
The following is a list of selected publications. A full list of publications is listed on my cv.
The American Southeast at the End of the Ice Age
University of Alabama Press (2022).
2022 Tune, J. W., T. A. Jennings, and A. Deter-Wolf. Prismatic Blade Production at the Sinclair Site, Tennessee: Implications for Understanding Clovis Technological Organization. American Antiquity.
2020 Tune, J. W. The Colonization of Ireland: A Human Ecology Perspective. Quaternary Science Reviews 249.
2020 Tune, J. W. Hunter-Gatherer Occupation of the Central Colorado Plateau during the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition. American Antiquity (cover) 85(3):573-590.
2020 Maitland, B. A., J. W. Tune, M. P. Grubb. Identification of the Natural Origin of Waterproofing Pine Pitch in Historical Southwest Native American Basketry Through Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 30.
2019 Smith, H. L. and J. W. Tune (editors). Fluted Point Technologies: An Interregional Perspective. PaleoAmerica 5(2).
2018 Miller, D. S. and J. W. Tune. When the Levee Breaks: How an Ant Hill and a Deer on a Mound Made Us Re-Think the Effect of the Younger Dryas. In The Archaeology of Everyday Matters, edited by S. E. Price and P. J. Carr, pp. 14-23. University Press of Florida.
