Dr. Jesse Tune is an Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Mississippi. He is the Director of the Center for Archaeological Research. His specialization as an archaeologist includes the study of human migrations and the colonization of new landscapes during the Pleistocene and early Holocene.
Research Interests
Dr. Tune's research focuses on investigating the relationships between humans and the environment. He has ongoing research projects in southeastern North America and the Intermountain West, as well as research interests in North Europe.
He is specifically interested in how humans adapt to new environmental conditions because of group mobility and/or environmental changes. He incorporates lithic analysis, geoarchaeology, and geospatial data with ArcGIS to explore how social groups respond to changing environmental conditions. When and how humans entered the Americas remain some of the most pressing questions in North American archaeology today. As such, Dr. Tune's research into human-environment relationships informs archaeological questions, as well as human ecology, environmental change, and human geography, among other disciplines.
Dr. Tune's current research involves documenting early human occupation of North America, investigating the evolution of lithic technologies during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition, and studying how Pleistocene-age hunter-gatherers adapted to resource accessibility.
Human behavioral ecology theoretically guides his work in developing testable hypotheses using archaeological and environmental data. He incorporates unoccupied aerial systems (aka drone)-based remote sensing with more traditional field methods to document archaeological site structures and address landscape-level questions related to site formation processes and land use practices. Such methods allow me to unite information across disciplines and spatial scales. He links micro-level data (e.g., pollen in a sediment core) to macro-level data (e.g., stone tool morphology) to site-level data (e.g., UAS-derived photogrammetric microtopography) to landscape-level data (e.g., lithic source material least-cost path analysis) to develop a holistic perspective on human-environment interactions.
Biography
Dr. Jessi Tune earned BS degrees in Anthropology and Aerospace from Middle Tennessee State University (2008) and an MA degree in Anthropology from American University (2010) in Washington D.C. He earned a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Texas A&M University (2015) where he studied in the Center for the Study of the First Americans. He joined the University of Mississippi as the Director of the Center for Archaeological Research in 2023.
Publications
2022 Tune, J. W., T. A. Jennings, and A. Deter-Wolf. Prismatic Blade Production at the Sinclair Site, Tennessee: Implications for Understanding Clovis Technological Organization. American Antiquity.
2020 Tune, J. W. The Colonization of Ireland: A Human Ecology Perspective. Quaternary Science Reviews 249.
2020 Tune, J. W. Hunter-Gatherer Occupation of the Central Colorado Plateau during the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition. American Antiquity (cover) 85(3):573-590.
2020 Maitland, B. A., J. W. Tune, M. P. Grubb. Identification of the Natural Origin of Waterproofing Pine Pitch in Historical Southwest Native American Basketry Through Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 30.
2019 Smith, H. L. and J. W. Tune (editors). Fluted Point Technologies: An Interregional Perspective. PaleoAmerica 5(2).
2018 Miller, D. S. and J. W. Tune. When the Levee Breaks: How an Ant Hill and a Deer on a Mound Made Us Re-Think the Effect of the Younger Dryas. In The Archaeology of Everyday Matters, edited by S. E. Price and P. J. Carr, pp. 14-23. University Press of Florida.
Courses Taught
- Anth 305 Archaeology
- Anth 311 Topics in Anthropology
- Anth 318 Archaeology of Mississippi and the South
- Anth 608 Seminar in Archaeology
- Anth 621 Readings in Anthropology I
Education
Ph.D. Anthropology, Texas A & M University (2015)
In the News
Jesse Tune to bring cutting-edge methodologies to university
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Honors & Awards