Daniel H Temple

Chair

Professor

Anthropology: bioarchaeology, developmental stress, life history theory, hunter-gatherers, mortuary practices, biodistance analysis, children and childhood, biomechanics and activity reconstruction, diet, resilience theory and new materialism

Daniel H. Temple received a BA in anthropology from Arizona State University in 2001 and Ph.D. in biological anthropology from The Ohio State University in 2007. He teaches courses that focus on bioarchaeology, human growth and development, the social histories and epistimes underlying the development of biological and biocultural anthropology, human evolution, and scientific racism. He is a bioarchaeologist and uses human skeletal remains and underlying mortuary contexts to understand lifeways in the human past. He has published more than 40 journal articles and book chapters addressing questions of growth and development from social, ecological, and physiological perspectives; life history theory and stress; hunter-gatherer resilience and adaptability; habitual activity, sexual divisions of labor, and the colonial practice of science; population interaction and resilience; and the ontology of personhood in hunter-gatherer communities. These works have been published in leading journals including the American Journal of Biological Anthropology, American Antiquity, Yearbook of Biological Anthropology, and Bioarchaeology International.

His most recent edited volume (2019) Hunter-Gatherer Resilience and Adaptation: A Bioarchaeological Perspective was published with Cambridge University Press. The volume explores how hunter-gatherers create and maintain resilient lifeways in terms of diet, mobility, landscape occupation, and ideological behaviors. Chapters in this volume identify flexibility in subsistence economy, regional interaction, and communal memory as hallmarks of resilient communities. While factors such as rigidity in subsistence behavior, inequality, land dispossession, interdependence, and intrusive migration are identified as behaviors eroding resilient lifeways.

Temple is currently an associate editor for the American Journal of Biological Anthropology and has served on the editorial board for this journal since 2019.

He is available to supervise a limited number of graduate student projects in bioarchaeology that are related to growth and development, life history, mortuary practices, hunter-gatherer resilience, colonialism, and habitual activity.

Selected Publications

Edited Volume

Daniel H. Temple, Christopher Stojanowski (2019) Hunter-Gatherer Adaptation and Resilience: A Bioarchaeological Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 395 pp.

Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Daniel H. Temple, Gunita Zariņa, Ilga Zagorska, Aija Macāne (2026) Biomechanical evidence for occupational specialization in Mesolithic-Neolithic hunter-gatherers from Zvejnieki, Latvia. Science Advances 12: eaed3371.

Camille Cronkite, Daniel H. Temple, Anna J. Osterholtz, Ivan Valent, Christine A.M. France (2025) Interindividual variation in infant and child feeding behavior at Đurđevac-Sošice, medieval Croatia: Exploring life course through incremental analysis of dentin. Journal of Archaeological Science 182: 106357.

Daniel H. Temple, Gunita Zarina, Ilga Zagorska (2025) Lower limb diaphyseal morphology reveals diverse mobility strategies in the creation and maintenance of resilient landscapes: coastal hunter-gatherers from Japan and Latvia. In: Bradtmoller M, Lavi N editors. Under Pressure? Living with Climate Change and Environmental Hazards in the Past and Now. New York: Springer. p 195-221.

Daniel H. Temple, Haagen D. Klaus (2023) Synthesizing stress in paleopathological perspective: Theory, method, application. In Grauer A., editor. The Routledge Handbook of Paleopathology. New York: Routledge. p 397-416.

Daniel H. Temple, Emily R. Rosa, David R. Hunt, Christopher B. Ruff (2023). Adapting in the Arctic II: Upper limb diaphyseal robusticity and habitual activity in Late Holocene hunter-gatherers from Alaska. American Journal of Biological Anthropology 181 (3): 392-412.

Daniel H. Temple, Ashley N. Edes (2022) Stress in bioarchaeology, epidemiology, and evolutionary medicine: An integrated conceptual model of shared history from the descriptive to the developmental. In: Plomp K, Roberts C, Elton S, Bentley G, editors. Evolutionary Health: Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p 261-282.

Daniel H. Temple (2019) Bioarchaeological perspectives on early life stress: evidence for plasticity and constraint in human skeletal and dental remains. Evolutionary Anthropology 28: 34-46. Invited contribution.

Lauryn Justice, Daniel H. Temple (2019) Bioarchaeological evidence for cultural resilience at Point Hope, Alaska: persistence and memory in the ontology of personhood in northern hunter-gatherers. In: Temple DH, Stojanowski CM, editors. Hunter-Gatherer Resilience and Adaptation: A Bioarchaeological Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p 253-273.