Susan Pfeiffer
Susan K. Pfeiffer, Ph.D. (University of Toronto, 1976)
Professor, St. George Campus
(416) 978-4004
Office: AP 528
Lab: AP 530
Field: Biological anthropology, skeletal biology of past peoples; Southern Africa, North East North America
Research
Dr. Pfeiffer's research concentrates on reconstructing the conditions of life from characteristics of bones and teeth. She is especially interested in newer methods that focus at the tissue level, such as biomechanical modeling and histology. In the past decade she has focused on research questions based in southern Africa. She was drawn to that region because of its rich archaeological record and long temporal evidence for peoples with successful hunting and gathering adaptations. She is a research associate in the Archaeology Department at the University of Cape Town and has taught undergraduate courses in Human Evolution there.
Dr. Pfeiffer has also contributed to questions about the lives of the ancestors of Canadian First Nations peoples. Since her PhD thesis on hunter-gatherer populations of the Upper Great Lakes, she has published research on archaeologically derived skeletons from Ontario, especially the ossuaries of the Northern Iroquoians. She has served as an associate editor of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.
Recent Publications
In press. Pfeiffer, S. Population dynamics in the Southern African Holocene: Human Burials from the West Coast. In: The Archaeology of the West Coast of South Africa. Editors: A. Jerardino, D. Braun, A. Malan. Archaeopress, Oxford.
2012 Pfeiffer, S. Conditions for evolution of small adult body size in Southern Africa. Human Biology and the origin of Homo. Current Anthropology 53:S6:S383-S394, Editors: S. Antόn, L. Aiello. Wenner-Gren Foundation Symposium
2012 Pfeiffer, S., Pinto, D. Histological analyses of human bone from archaeological contexts. Chapter 11. In: Bone Histology: An Anthropological Perspective, Sam Stout and Christian Crowder, eds., pp. 297-311, Boca Raton: CRC Press.
2012 Pfeiffer, S. Two Disparate Instances of Healed Cranial Trauma from the Later Stone Age. South African Archaeological Bulletin 67(196):256-261.
2012 Kurki, H.K., Pfeiffer, S., Stynder, D.D. Allometry of head and body size in Holocene foragers of the South African Cape. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 147:462–471.
2011 Doyle, L.E., Lazenby, R.A., Pfeiffer, S. Cortical bone mass and geometry: age, sex, and intraskeletal variation in Nineteenth-Century Euro-Canadians. American Journal of Human Biology 23:534-545.
2011 Pfeiffer, S., Harrington, L. Bioarchaeological evidence for the basis of small adult stature in southern Africa. Current Anthropology, 52:3:449-461.
2011 Pfeiffer, S. Pelvic stress injuries in a small-bodied forager. International Journal of Osteoarchaeology. 21:694-703.
2010 Pfeiffer, S., Harrington, L. Child growth among southern African foragers. In: Moffat, T. and Prowse, T. (eds.) Human Diet and Nutrition in Biocultural Perspective, pp. 35-56, Biosocial Book Series, Catherine Panter-Brick (ed.), Berghahn Press (Oxford and New York).
2010 Crowder, C., Pfeiffer, S. The application of cortical bone histomorphometry to estimate age at death. In: Age Estimation from the Human Skeleton. Editors: Krista E. Latham and Michael Finnegan. Pp. 193-215. C.C.Thomas.
- Susan Pfeiffer with her graduate students (from left to right) Natalie Symchych, Daniel Black, Michelle Cameron, Elizabeth Sawchuk, Bess Doyle, Jarred Heinrich, and Catherine Merritt, 2013
