Colin Wren on the Atlantic coast, Nova Scotia

Colin D. Wren, Ph.D.

Associate Professor; Chair Anthropology
(719) 255-3761
cwren@uccs.edu
CENT 114
(719) 255-3761
cwren@uccs.edu
CENT 114

About

As an archaeologist, my research explores how people adapted to changing environments in the past, from the first humans in Africa over 100,000 years ago to Paleolithic Europeans to Indigenous peoples in Colorado and northern Canada in the last 8000 years. I use a variety of modelling approaches, including agent-based modelling (ABM), Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and other quantitative methods to investigate how climate, landscape, and ecological changes impact human society and culture around the world. If you're interested in agent-based modelling, my friends and I wrote a comprehensive textbook to help you learn (and it's free!): Agent-based modeling: Simulating the Complexity of Societies.   

My research focuses on reconstructing human-environment interactions in a variety of case studies, and on how people in each region and time period have made choices about how to interact and adapt to their changing environmental circumstances. What made us resilient to change? How adaptable are we at our core? And at what period of our past did our adaptability first emerge and why?

My on-going projects include:

  • Change and adaptation of human foraging strategies along coastal South Africa during the Middle (300-50 k years ago) and Later (50-19 k years ago) Stone Age. (Take my ANTH 3240 - Archaeology & Genetics of the Stone Age class!). This project involves detailed reconstructions of the ancient climate, vegetation, coastal habitats, and mammalian ecosystem using quantitative modelling, and an agent-based model of human foraging and mobility behaviour. The sites we're analysing, the Pinnacle Point Site Complex, was recently included in a set of UNESCO World Heritage sites!
  • The Archaeology of Climate Change: with colleagues at the Université de Montréal, Canada I have published several papers outlining our approach of using archaeology to understand how people adapted to their changing environments. This includes a variety of quantitative and simulation modelling methods to reconstruct past environmental states, rates of change, and comparisons to the archaeological record left behind by past peoples. We also published a model predicting the pattern of interaction between groups in Western Europe during the Last Glacial Maximum (19 k years ago). Relatedly, with colleagues in Arhus University, Denmark, we examined the ways past societies have used mobility, storage, intensification, and trade to cope with periods of catastrophic environmental change (read our paper Bad Year Econometrics published in Science Advances) 
  • I fell sideways into a major research project on how modern reindeer herding is changing in the face of climate change and increasing industrial development in modern Finland & Norway. I know, this really isn't archaeology but it's still Anthropology and also involves really cool GIS mobility modelling using several hundred thousand GPS collar points from Finnish reindeer and UCCS's super-compute cluster INCLINE.
  • I am also working on a spatial analysis of the Homo naledi fossils within the deep underground Rising Star Cave system, South Afria but that's a longer story. Part of this work is published in this controversial paper proposing that Homo naledi intentionally buried their dead. 
  • When I have spare moments, I'm analysing the results of several field seasons of data from our summer Archaeological Field School here in Colorado Springs with our students (sign up for ANTH 3190 - Field Practicum in Applied Archaeology next year! 

 

Education

  • Postdoc, Institute of Human Origins, Arizona State University
  • PhD, Archaeology, McGill University
  • MSc, GIS and Spatial Analysis in Archaeology, University College London
  • BA, Anthropology, McGill University

Select Publications

  • Boisard, S., Wren, C.D., Timbrell, L., Burke, A., 2025. Climate frameworks for the Middle Stone Age and Later Stone Age in Northwest Africa. Quaternary International 716, 109593. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2024.109593 
  • Botha, M.S., De Vynck, J.C., Wren, C.D., 2025. Fuelwood harvesting rates from the perspective of early hunter-gatherers on the Cape south coast, South Africa. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 61, 104960. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2024.104960 
  • Wren, C.D., Romanowska, I., Riede, F., 2025. Bad year econometrics: Agent-based modeling of risk management strategies under varying regimes of environmental change. Science Advances 11, eadr0314. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adr0314
  • Berger, L.R., Makhubela, T.V., Molopyane, K., Krüger, A., Randolph-Quinney, P., Elliott, M., Peixotto, B., Fuentes, A., Tafforeau, P., Beyrand, V., Dollman, K., Jinnah, Z., Brewer Gillham, A., Broad, K., Brophy, J., Chinamatira, G., Dirks, P.H., Feuerriegel, E., Gurtov, A., Hlophe, N., Hunter, L., Hunter, R., Jakata, K., Jaskolski, C., Morris, H., Pryor, E., Mpete, M., Roberts, E.M., Smilg, J.S., Tsikoane, M., Tucker, S., Van Rooyen, D., Warren, K., Wren, C.D., Kissel, M., Spikins, P., Hawks, J., 2025. Evidence for deliberate burial of the dead by Homo naledi. eLife 12, RP89106. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.89106
  • Crabtree, S.A., Wren, C.D., Dixit, A., Levin, S.A., 2024. Influential individuals can promote prosocial practices in heterogeneous societies: a mathematical and agent-based model. PNAS Nexus 3, pgae224. (doi)
  • Wren, C.D., Janssen, M., Hill, K., Marean, C.W., 2023. What makes a forager turn coastal? An agent-based approach to coastal foraging on the dynamic South African Paleoscape, in: Thakar, H., Flores, C. (Eds.), Human Behavioral Ecology and Coastal Environments, Society and Ecology in Island and Coastal Archaeology Series. University of Florida Press, Gainesville, FL, pp. 172–198.
  • Romanowska, I., Wren, C.D., Crabtree, S.A., 2021. Agent-based modeling for archaeology: simulating the complexity of societies. SFI Press, Santa Fe. (doi)
  • Burke, A., Peros, M.C., Wren, C.D., Pausata, F.S.R., Riel-Salvatore, J., Moine, O., de Vernal, A., Kageyama, M., Boisard*, S., 2021. The archaeology of climate change: The case for cultural diversity. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 118, e2108537118. (doi) 
  • Gravel-Miguel, C., Murray, J.K., Schoville, B.J., Wren, C.D., Marean, C.W., 2021. Exploring variability in lithic armature discard in the archaeological record. Journal of Human Evolution 155, 102981. (doi)
  • Wren, C.D., Botha, S., De Vynck, J.C., Janssen, M.A., Hill, K., Shook, E., Harris, J., Wood, B.M., Venter, J., Franklin, J., Cowling, R.M., Potts, A.J., Fisher, E.C., Marean, C.W., 2020. The foraging potential of the Holocene Cape South Coast of South Africa without the Palaeo-Agulhas Plain. Quaternary Science Reviews 235, 105789. (doi)
  • Wren, C.D., Costopoulos, A., Hawley, M., 2020. Settlement Choice under conditions of rapid shoreline displacement in Wemindji Cree Territory, subarctic Quebec. Quaternary International. (doi)
  • Wren, C.D., Burke, A., 2019. Habitat suitability and the genetic structure of human populations during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) in Western Europe. PLOS ONE 14, e0217996. (doi)
  • Gravel-Miguel, C., Wren, C.D., 2018. Agent-based least-cost path analysis and the diffusion of Cantabrian Lower Magdalenian engraved scapulae. Journal of Archaeological Science 99: 1-9. (doi)
  • Wren, C.D., Costopoulos, A., 2015. Does Environmental Knowledge Inhibit Hominin Dispersal? Human Biology 87, 205-223.
  • Wren, C.D., J. Z. Xue., A. Costopoulos, & A. Burke. 2014. The role of spatial foresight on models of hominin dispersal. Journal of Human Evolution 69:70-78. 
  • Costopoulos, A., S. Vaneeckhout, J. Okkonen, E. Hulse, I. Paberzyte, and C.D. Wren. 2012. Social complexity in the mid-Holocene northeastern Bothnian Gulf. European Journal of Archaeology 15(1): 41-60.

Courses Taught