Erik Otarola-Castillo

Department:

Anthropology

Research:

I am an evolutionary anthropologist and archaeologist. I earned my Ph.D. from Stony Brook University and became an Assistant Professor at Purdue University the same year. My contributions to anthropology uniquely combine anthropological theory with data science and Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods. This synergy guides my research on human-environmental interactions. Over time, I have conducted community-engaged research, established a database tracing 13,000 years of North American human-environment interactions, and written over 35 peer-reviewed papers for prestigious journals, including PNAS, Nature Scientific Reports, and the Annual Review of Anthropology.

Current Projects:

My research program revolves around the question, "What do people eat and why?” I integrate theoretical, experimental, and field research approaches to answer this, drawing from Anthropology, Biology, Statistics, and other disciplines. This multidisciplinary framework enables me to research a spectrum of human-environment interactions spanning modern, historic, and prehistoric periods, as evidenced in my recent publications (Otárola-Castillo et al., 2023a, b, Martin et al., 2022; Veile et al., 2022a, b). One prolific area of focus is the subsistence responses of early North Americans to climate change (e.g., Otárola-Castillo 2016). I continued this work with a project building a comprehensive archaeological database across the North American Great Plains and Midwest. The aim is to discover the 13,000-year processes linking food security, climate shifts, and fluctuations in human behavior. I have also secured funding to study ancient anthropogenic effects on the environment, focusing on the debated role of American hunters in the extinction of Late Pleistocene megafauna. My team uses innovative 3D morphometric and Bayesian techniques to analyze North and South American megafauna remains for potential human-hunting-induced bone surface modifications (BSM). We have published our experiments to create BSM under controlled conditions and introduced new methodologies to identify BSM evidence of hunting and butchery with greater confidence (e.g., Otárola-Castillo et al., 2023).

My expertise in statistics and computational methods, including Bayesian inference and AI, allows me to innovate research techniques within and beyond Anthropology. My open-source contributions, such as 3D-morphometrics software, have been used extensively in analyses of morphological variation. To increase the accessibility of Bayesian methods to archaeologists, I published accessible examples to illustrate the differences between Bayesian and traditional statistics. Additionally, although recent AI breakthroughs have paved the way for its incorporation into anthropological research, its “black box” nature can raise concerns about transparency and reliability (e.g., McPherron et al., 2022). To investigate this further, I recently earned a competitive Purdue fellowship to assess the use of AI and its potential pitfalls, focused on archaeological debates regarding humanity's role in the megafauna extinction during the last Ice Age. The primary outputs are systematic literature reviews of megafauna extinctions and guidance on applying AI methods in anthropological research.

Contact:

Email: eoc@purdue.edu
Link: Website/profile of Erik Otarola-Castillo