Amy Elizabeth Clark

AMY CLARK (Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, was awarded a Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship in October 2022 to aid writing and research on “At Home in the Paleolithic: The Making of the Home and its Archaeological Signatures.” Homes are spaces where we rest, prepare food, eat, care for children, and enjoy the company of our loved ones. The physical space varies culturally, yet no matter the context, the home is the setting for some of the most important aspects of our social, cultural, and economic lives. It is no wonder, then, that home holds a special emotional and symbolic significance for humans. But how did home come to be? And how did the home itself play a role in the evolution of humans? In The Home and its Role in Human Evolution, the grantee considers the material signatures of the myriad economic, symbolic, and social behaviors that together constitute the home, then tracks these signatures through time, focusing on the origins and evolution of homemaking within the Paleolithic, and how they contributed to the evolution of Homo sapiens.