HECL promotes interdisciplinary research that is engaged, both intellectually and in practice, with Global Environmental Change as experienced through humans. It supports work that focuses on long-term human and ecological well-being in light of changing social and environmental conditions. Problem-based research requires a diverse set of methods and scales of analysis. The lab promotes methods that range from traditional ethnographic inquiries to the development of dynamic geospatial datasets and scales of inquiry that may move between local landscapes and the global.

The Behavioral Ecology and Economic Decisions Laboratory (BEEDL) provides resources and workspace for anthropologists interested in human decision-making and behavior in an ecological and evolutionary context, with specific focus on subsistence in rural populations. We are concerned with two stages of analysis. The first is how individuals make decisions, including processes of perception, evaluation, emotion, and social learning, as explored through experimental economic methods. The second stage is the behavioral outcomes of decisions, including food production and household livelihood strategies, as explored through ethnographic methods.

The Cultural and Political Ecology (CAPE) lab focuses on human use and conservation of landscapes, especial forested and agricultural ones, and how these are related to cultural, historical, and political forces. We pay particular attention to how individuals negotiate with, rather than wholeheartedly accept, political forces, and how they use and conserve resources as a result. As Dr. Velasquez Runk worked previously as a conservation and development practitioner, she has a commitment to collaborative research, as well as making constructive recommendations for applied work. We also conduct research that falls more broadly within cultural anthropology (such as cosmology, interethnic relations, and sociolinguistics).

The central focus of this lab is to explore the relationship between climatic changes and evolutionary processes. To do so, we study fossil mammals spanning the last several million years of Earth history. We currently have ongoing, long-term field projects in East Africa and South America. The East African projects include fieldwork in the Dikika area of Ethiopia (Hadar Formation), the lower Omo Valley of southern Ethiopia (Mursi Formation), and the Turkana Basin of northern Kenya (Koobi Fora Formation). The fossil record from these areas includes some of the most important paleoanthropological localities on the planet. These are areas in which many key hominid fossils have been found. Thus, the East African projects seek to understand the environmental and ecological context in which humans have evolved. The work in South America is focused on the Chilean Andes, including the Altiplano in the north and Patagonia in the south. Here the research aims to understand the environmental context of early South American primates.

The lab hosts two important databases. The Turkana Basin Paleontology Database is an archive of fossil vertebrates (16,500 records) from northern Kenya, and includes data collected by several research teams during the last 40 years. This database has been compiled though a collaborative effort that includes the National Museums of Kenya, the Smithsonian Institution, and the University of Georgia. The database is scheduled to go online in early 2010. The second database is the Shungura Faunal Catalogue of fossil vertebrates, collected by F.C. Howell and G.G. Eck during the late 1960s and early 1970s and includes more than 20,000 records of species spanning the Pliocene and early Pleistocene of East Africa. The Shungura Faunal Catalogue is also scheduled to go online in early 2010.

The Paleoanthropology and Paleoecology Lab also houses a collection of primate and other vertebrate bones and high-quality casts of fossil hominids. These specimens are part of a comparative osteological collection in the Department of Anthropology at UGA, and are used extensively in classes such as Human Osteology (ANTH 4730/6730), Paleoanthropology (ANTH 4061/6061), and Primate Ecology and Evolution (ANTH 4740/6740). Students in these classes make use of the lab to learn about the human skeleton and to compare human bones with those of other primates.

Current members: René Bobe, Victor Iminjili, Sarah Hakala

The Department of Anthropology is one of the few academic departments in the country to include an active Zooarchaeology Laboratory. Development of the laboratory was made possible by Heritage Preservation Grants administered through the Georgia Department of Natural Resources. The laboratory contains 4,500 comparative skeletal specimens of vertebrates from throughout the southeastern United States and adjacent waters, as well as from the Caribbean. Since 1977, vertebrate assemblages from 250 archaeological sites have been examined from such diverse locations as San Saba, Texas; St. Catherines Island, Georgia; and Quebrara Jaguay, Peru. Several of these collections were analyzed by students as part of their dissertation or thesis research. Laboratory personnel are particularly active in research involving coastal adaptations of Spanish, plantation, and Native American populations. This research examines such questions as differences in rural/urban subsistence strategies, Native American contributions to colonial subsistence strategies, the evolution of the urban environment, and the use of marine resources throughout the Americas. Methodological research into allometric relationships and incremental growth structures is also conducted. Students are encouraged to participate in these activities, with funds being occasionally available. A course in Zooarchaeology is offered annually.

The "Ecolab" is a research facility within the Department of Anthropology that provides opportunities for graduate and faculty research in ecological and environmental anthropology. Since its inception in 1994, faculty and student researchers directly associated with the laboratory have generated in excess of $10 million dollars in external funding. T. Gragson serves as Director of the lab, and also serves as Principal Investigator on numerous research projects that collectively support many undergraduate and graduate students as well as colleagues in other departments. A significant project is the Coweeta Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) project, a multi-year, multi-million dollar undertaking.

The Georgia Archaeological Site File (GASF) is the official repository for information about known archaeological sites of all periods in the state of Georgia. Since its founding in 1976, it has become the primary source for documentation about Georgia Archaeology for archaeologists everywhere. The GASF contains many different types of information about archaeological sites, including locations, cultural periods, and information relating to the National Register of Historic Places. In addition to these site-based resources, the GASF houses over 2,800 Cultural Resource Management (CRM) reports from investigations in Georgia and over 700 manuscripts from archaeological research connected with the University of Georgia.

Research in the Ethnoecology/Biodiversity Laboratory is directed towards the understanding of human-environment interaction in terms of perception, cognition, and decision making pertaining to natural resources. Research projects include memory banking of indigenous knowledge associated with traditional varieties of food crops, cognitive mapping by people belonging to different categories of environmental features around a watershed, culturally relevant indicators of sustainability as elicited through thematic apperception tests (TATs) and life histories, and  informal seed networks and cultural alternatives in in-situ germplasm conservation. Bibliographic data bases are available on biodiversity, ethnoecology, and sustainable development as are modern facilities for problem-focused herbarium, entomological, geological and cartographic collecting, processing, and storage.

The Conservation and Community Lab (CCL) was established to respond, through research and training, to one of the key challenges facing conservation today: identifying conservation practices and policies that are simultaneously effective, just, and equitable. Anthropologists have an important role to play in addressing this issue. The Conservation and Community Lab promotes the integration of anthropological research methods and conceptual approaches in conservation by identifying existing research initiatives or developing new initiatives in which opportunities exist for anthropologists to influence conservation policies and practices. Since establishing the CCL in Fall 2003, we have been building a resource collection of journal articles, books reports, grey literature, and online references that are available to UGA Anthropology graduate students and other researchers interested in CCL research priorities. Presently the CCL serves as the information node for the planning phase of a project supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation called Advancing Conservation in a Social Context.

A variety of instruments and lab facilities are available to students interested in archaeological science. They include archaeogeophysical instruments such as ground penetrating radar (GPR) with multiple frequency antennae; magnetometers, resistivity/conductivity systems; and magnetic susceptibility meters. A variety of geoarchaeological sampling systems, including cryogenic probe technology, are resident at UGA. Marine archaeology survey systems such as a high-resolution( 200 -3.5 kHz) seismic profiler are maintained. Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers are owned by the Department. Through faculty associates of the Center for Archaeological Science there are palynology, geochronology, isotopic and pedology laboratories readily available to the student. Work stations equipped to perform high-end data modeling and graphical applications are available through the archaeological geology/archaeometry program directed by Professor Garrison.

The Laboratory of Archaeology is located in the Riverbend Research Laboratory on South Campus. The Laboratory has 2500 square feet of curation space equipped with compression shelving and 1600 square feet of analysis space. A variety of analytic equipment, including microscopes, electronic balances, and computers, is available for research use by students and faculty. The Laboratory houses over three million artifacts, the majority of which are from large scale excavation and survey projects. In conjunction with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, the Laboratory maintains a state site file which contains information on over 25,000 archaeological sites and over 2,000 reports and manuscripts pertaining to Georgia archaeology.