University of Oxford

Dr Matt Grove

Research Interests

Matt Grove is a Postdoctoral Associate of the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford. Matt’s Ph.D., supervised by Professor Clive Gamble and completed in 2008, combined spatial and allometric analyses to predict the group sizes, home range areas and land use patterns of extinct hominins, as well as modern human and non-human primate groups. His interests more generally lie in the application of evolutionary, quantitative and computational methodologies to archaeological data. This has led to the development of a broad approach to the geometry of mobility based on archaeologically calibrated modeling of foraging activities and their likely archaeological correlates.

Matt’s ongoing research interests include:

• The development, from first principals, of geometric and agent-based models of fission-fusion social systems in non-human primates, with the aim of referring such models to the archaeological record of early Homo social groups.
• The development of fully data-driven approaches to spatial analysis in archaeology, including the reconstruction of hunter-gatherer mobility strategies, group sizes, and land use patterns.
• Mathematical modeling and simulation studies of foraging decisions in hunter-gatherer groups as they relate to group size, technological efficiency, and the scale of annual movement.
• (With Dr. Fiona Coward) studies of the neurological mechanisms facilitating the socially mediated production of material culture in hominin groups, focusing on the evidence for distributed cognition and innovation in the archaeological record.