Student Information
Graduate Student
Anthropology
The College of Lib Arts & Sci
Long Bio
I am a quantitative historical social scientist with research interests in human macroecology, sociocultural evolution, urbanism, and human cooperation. I build and test formal theoretical models of how variations in human-environment interaction generate the systematic large-scale patterns and processes we observe in the ethnographic, archaeological, and historical records. My scholarship has two central objectives. The first is to use large-scale variations over time and space to better understand the fundamental structure and function of all human societies. The second is to understand how social processes such as the evolution of complex large-scale societies and the increasing scope of human cooperation over the last 12,000 years are rooted in macroecological processes such as the intensification of agriculture, energy capture, and land use.
Education
MA, Columbia University
MA, University of Chicago
BA, University of Texas at Austin
Publications
Sandeford, DS, Turchin, P, Hamilton, MJ, Lobo, J. n.d. A macroecological theory of social complexity and cooperation: why larger polities are more dense and complex and how this makes cooperation at increasing scales possible. Runner up for the 2021 Reynold Ruppe Prize for best paper in archaeology by a graduate student in SHESC.
Sandeford, DS. 2021. A quantitative analysis of intensification in the ethographic record. Nature Human Behaviour 5:1502-1509. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01120-w. Runner up for the 2020 Reynold Ruppe Prize for best paper in archaeology by a graduate student in SHESC.
Hamilton, M, Walker, RS, Buchanan B, and Sandeford, DS. 2020. Scaling human sociopolitical complexity. PLoS ONE 15(7): e0234615. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0234615.
Sandeford, DS. 2018. Organizational complexity and demographic scale in primary states. Royal Society Open Science 5:171137. http://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/5/5/171137. Awarded the 2019 Reynold Ruppe Prize for best paper in archaeology by a graduate student in SHESC.
Sandeford, DS. n.d. Chomsky versus Habermas on human nature and political evolution. Master's thesis, University of Chicago.
Research Interests
See biography for details.
Research Activity
I used large-scale data sets to investigate the structure, function, and dynamics of human social organization and cultures.
Presentations
Courses taught at various community colleges: introduction to sociology (the structure and function of human societies); introduction to archaeological anthropology (the evolution of human societies)