David Thulman is President and co-founder of the ARCO_OP and its most prolific researcher. Thulman is from Washington, DC, where he spent his formative years in the Smithsonian Natural History Museum dreaming of becoming a paleontologist or anthropologist studying human evolution. He got an anthropology degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1978 but took a detour to the George Washington University Law School, where he graduated in 1982 with a concentration in environmental law. He spent over 20 years with Florida’s environmental departments litigating environmental violations. In 1995, he volunteered on the soon-to-be-famous Page-Ladson site, an underwater archaeology site near Tallahassee and was hooked when it was clear that hanging out with archaeologists and graduate students was so much more fun than dealing with lawyers. He went to graduate school at Florida State University and received his PhD in 2006. He moved back to the DC area and has been teaching archaeology at George Washington University since 2007.
Thulman’s main research interest is reconstructing pre-contact social organization in the Paleoindian and Early Archaic periods in North America from patterns of artifact shape variation, which requires, among other things, coming to grips with statistics, using Bayesian methods to untangle the details of radiocarbon dating, and understanding how humans translate memory into behavior. He is interested in epistemology and the challenges of translating data into sound archaeological inference, which sometimes makes him a bummer at parties.
He does occasional fieldwork in Florida but mostly public and private collections-based research in North America. His dream is to find a Paleoindian site with preserved organics, and he believes Florida freshwater bodies are the best places to do that in North America.