Rate My Professor Amber Johnson

Dr. Amber Johnson is Professor of Anthropology at Truman State University, where she has been on the faculty since 2001 in the Social Sciences and Human Inquiry Department. She earned her bachelor's degree from Rice University and received both her master's degree and Ph.D. in anthropology from Southern Methodist University in 1997. Johnson's research examines how humans adapt to their environments and investigates the extent to which cultural changes result from demographic pressures versus environmental shifts. Her ongoing projects analyze macroecological patterns in the global transition from foraging to food production. Serving as research assistant to archaeologist Lewis Binford from 1994 to 1997, Johnson co-developed the EnvCalc program in 1996 to compute environmental and hunter-gatherer frames of reference for cross-cultural comparisons. With assistance from Truman computer science and anthropology students, she converted it to Java as EnvCalc v2 in 2006 and updated it to v2.1 in 2014, making it open-source for ethnographic and archaeological analysis using Binford's dataset of 339 hunter-gatherer societies.

Amber Johnson has advanced processual archaeology through key publications, including her book Processual Archaeology: Exploring Analytical Strategies, Frames of Reference, and Culture Process (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2004). Notable articles feature 'Exploring adaptive variation among hunter-gatherers with Binford’s frames of reference' (Journal of Archaeological Research, 2014), co-authored 'Archaeological assessment reveals Earth’s early transformation through land use' (Science, 2019), 'Exploring Texas archaeology with a model of intensification' (Plains Anthropologist, 2008), and 'Cross-cultural analysis of pastoral adaptations and organizational states: a preliminary study' (Cross-Cultural Research, 2002). These works demonstrate her influence, with hundreds of citations. Johnson teaches courses including New Majors Seminar, Anthropology of Gender, World Prehistory, Research Design, Data Analysis & Reporting, Capstone: Career Preparation, Self & Society: Living in the Anthropocene, and Junior Interdisciplinary Seminar on Human Impact of/on Climate Change. She is a member of the Society for American Archaeology.