Kailin Hatlestad
Balancing nature and culture in North European landscape evolution and integrated legacies
MA Anthropology-Archaeology (University of Montana-Missoula)
BA Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology (University of Minnesota-Minneapolis)
Host University: Uppsala University, Sweden
Main Supervisor: Karl-Johan Lindholm
Country of Origin: USA
Languages: English (fluent), Spanish (CEF B1), Swedish (CEF A1)
Contact Email: kailin.hatlestad@arkeologi.uu.se

About Me
My primary research interest has been in Global Change Archaeology of North America and its use in Agent-Based Modeling to understand how resilient behaviors of social systems can inform sustainable development policies and initiatives. My experiences with the United States Forest Service and private environmental engineering and consulting firms reinforced this research and personal interest in sustainable and viable global development and led me to the MSCA European Training Network TERRANOVA PhD research fellowship.
Having always been enthusiastic about the outdoors and investigative work, the field of archaeology was a natural fit and is ideal for examining the role of resilient behaviors in counteracting socio-natural perturbations. Through this fellowship, I am excited to explore on a greater scale and in a more robust manner how methods of land use and social structure can inform contemporary sustainability issues concerning both culture and environment.
About the project
The ESR 2 TERRANOVA research project aims to model the settlement and land-use history of Northwest European landscapes with a focus on the long-term impact of human land-use on fluvial systems in a Temperate-Atlantic climate located in the Netherlands and in Germany and in a Boreal-Continental climate located in central Sweden. In addition, the project aims to examine systemic links between these up- and low-land areas in order to identify the most significant drivers in regional human-environmental interactions.
The major accomplishments expected include developing a spatial database for both archaeological and historical landscape data, from which models of long-term regional landscape dynamics over shifts in energy regimes and agent-based models of human-environment interactions and landscape change are developed.