Dr. Weston McCool is a quantitative archaeologist and human ecologist interested in all the ways humans adapt to challenging circumstances. Whether climate shocks, resource-poor environments, population pressure, or conflict, humans establish innovative, though not always successful, strategies for coping with hard times. His role as an archaeologist is to use our material remains to infer past human behavior within a perspective of human behavioral ecology. This means, Dr. McCool is interested in the archaeological record for what it can tell us about behavior in relation to complex socio-ecological dynamics. He is particularly interested in why people so often resort to violent conflict and its impacts on population health and resilience. He explores these issues using spatio-statistical models, big data, isotope chemistry, and other methods from environmental archaeology and bioarchaeology. Weston’s primary field sites are in the central Andes and western North America, but he has experience working with archaeological and contemporary populations around the globe.