Jack M. Broughton
Associate Professor of Anthropology
Background and Interests
I grew up in rural southern California where, by the age of five, I had developed deep interests in natural history. I spent my youth collecting butterflies, watching birds, and skinning skunks. In 1986, I graduated from California State University, Chico with a degree in Anthropology and with extensive coursework in zoology. I earned an M.A. in 1988 at California State University with a thesis on prehistoric fish use in the Sacramento Valley (graduate advisor: Frank E. Bayham). In 1995, I received a Ph. D. in Anthropology from the University of Washington with a dissertation on prehistoric prey depression in the San Francisco Bay area (graduate advisor: Donald K. Grayson). I joined the Department of Anthropology at the University of Utah in 1995 and hold an adjunct appointment in vertebrate zoology at the Utah Museum of Natural History. My primary research interest lies in human paleoecology, especially the impacts that prehistoric peoples had on their faunal landscapes, and the implications of those impacts for related aspects of human behavior and modern conservation biology. I address these interests principally through the quantitative application of foraging theory to the zooarchaeological record of ancient foraging behavior. To this end, I have analyzed archaeological and paleontological fish, bird, and mammal faunas from across California and the arid West.
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