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Anthropology

Dr. April Nowell

Dr. April Nowell

Professor

Anthropology

Contact:
Office: COR B340 250-721-7054
Credentials:
PhD (University of Pennsylvania)
Area of expertise:
Neanderthal, Paleolithic art and archaeology, Hominin life histories, cognitive archaeology, archaeology of children, Levant and Europe

Bio

Dr. April Nowell is a Paleolithic archaeologist and Professor of Anthropology who specializes in cognitive archaeology, Paleolithic art, Neandertal lifeways, the archaeology of children and the relationship between science, pop culture, and the media. She is the author of Growing Up in the Ice Age (2021).

Courses

    • ANTH 341 Paleolithic Archaeology
    • ANTH 349 Paleolithic Art
    • ANTH 362 Archeology of Children
    • ANTH 441 Archaeological Theory
    • ANTH 499 Honours Seminar

Current projects

My new book Growing Up in the Ice Age: Fossil and Archaeological Evidence of the Lived Lives of Plio-Pleistocene Children is the culmination of the last 15 years of research into the lives of Ice Age children. Winner of the 2023 EAA Book Prize.

My research in Paleolithic art includes fieldwork in Koonalda Cave, Southern Australia in conjunction with Traditional Owners. Thousands of years ago, people visited the cave and drew with their fingers in soft sediment covering its walls and  ceilings. We are studying these digital tracings  within a broader tradition of performative storytelling. This research is sponsored by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

For thousands of years, plants and animals including early humans moved back and forth along the Levantine corridor—a geographic region that connects Africa to Eurasia.

At the margin of this corridor lies the Azraq Basin in the Eastern Desert of Jordan, which previously had extensive spring-fed wetlands at its center.

These wetlands remained intact until the early 1990s when the combination of climate change and years of water overdraw led to desiccation of the springs. The two largest aquifer-fed marshes, Druze Marsh (DM) and Shishan Marsh (SM), collapsed shortly after, with only 10% of the latter marsh remaining despite restoration efforts and ongoing maintenance.

The dropping water table exposed abundant Paleolithic sites. Our initial excavations at these marshes suggest that the Azraq Basin was continuously occupied by hominins from at least 300,000 years before present (BP). 

Our new project aims to evaluate the Azraq Basin as part of an inland dispersal corridor for early humans expanding out of Africa and spreading across SW Asia and beyond. This will be accomplished by examining the relationship between fluctuating freshwater resources and hominin adaptation in the Basin between 400,000–40,000 BP.

Building on previous work, the project will entail targeted paleoenvironmental, geochronological, and technological analyses at key sites in the region, followed by comparisons with established records in the Levant to the west and central Arabia to the southeast. This research is sponsored by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

Neanderthal Sexual Behavior on “Betwixt the Sheets” podcast

 Dr. April Nowell’s TEDx talk

Selected publications

  • 2024. Collins, Benjamin and Nowell, April (eds). Culturing the Body: Prehistoric Perspectives on Identity and Sociality.  New York: Berghahn Books

  • 2021. Nowell, April. Growing Up in the Ice Age: Fossil and Archaeological Evidence of the Lived lives of Plio-Pleistocene Children. Oxford: Oxbow Books.

  • 2021. Davidson, Iain and Nowell, April (eds.). Making Scenes: Global Perspective on Scenes in Rock Art.  New York: Berghahn Books.

  • 2018. Gonlin, Nancy and Nowell, April (eds.). Archaeology of the Night.  Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado.

  • 2024. Nowell, April and Skala, Aurora. The well-dressed hominin: clothing, tanning, and textile production in the Paleolithic.  In Culturing the Body: Prehistoric Perspectives on Identity and Sociality, edited by Benjamin R. Collins and April Nowell. New York: Berghahn Books
  • 2024. Collins, Benjamin R., Nowell, April, Hatton Amy, and Ames, Christopher J. H. Manufacturing social landscape: Ostrich eggshell bead production and social connections at Grassridge Rockshelter, South Africa.  In Culturing the Body: Prehistoric Perspectives on Identity and Sociality, edited by Benjamin R. Collins and April Nowell.   New York: Berghahn Books.
  • 2023. Skala, Aurora, Nowell, April, Walkus, Jennifer, and McLaren, Duncan. A storied landscape: Rock art in Kitasoo/Xai’xais, Heiltsuk, and Wuikinuxv territories. In New Approaches to Rock Art in Canada: Indigenous knowledges, Sacred Landscapes and Cultural Heritage, edited by Dagmara Zawadzka, Oscar Moro Abadía and Bryn Tapper. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.
  • 2022. Kubicka, Anna Maria, Wragg-Sykes, Rebecca, Nowell, April, and Nelson, Emma. Neanderthal Sexual Behaviour. In The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Sexual Psychology, Volume 4, edited by Todd K. Shackelford. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 
  • 2021. Nowell, April, Kurki, Helen and Mitchell, Lisa M. Conceiving reproduction in archaeology. In Routledge Handbook on Anthropology and Reproduction, edited by Sallie Han and Cecelia Tomori. London: Routledge, pp. 68-84.
  • 2021. Davidson, Iain and Nowell, April. Introduction. Behind the scenes—did scenes in rock art create new ways of seeing the world? In I. Davidson & A. Nowell (Eds.), Making Scenes: Global Perspectives on Scenes in Rock Art. New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 1-16.
  • 2021. Van Gelder, Leslie and Nowell, April. Scene makers: Finger fluters in Upper Paleolithic caves. In Making Scenes: Scenes in Global Rock Art, edited by Iain Davidson and April Nowell. New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 194-206.
  • 2021. Davidson, Iain and Nowell, April. Epilogue. Is there more to scenes than meets the eye? In Making Scenes: Global Perspectives on Scenes in Rock Art, edited by I. Davidson and A. Nowell. New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 327-331.
  • 2021. Nowell, April and Cooke, Amanda. Culturing the body: adornment and ornamentation. In Oxford Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution, edited by Andrew Lock, Chris Sinha and Nathalie Gontier. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 1-32. 
  • 2020. Nowell, April and Gonlin, Nancy. Affordances of the night: Work after dark in the ancient world. In Rethinking Darkness: Histories, Cultures and Practices, edited by Timothy Edensor and Nick Dunn. New York: Routledge, pp. 27-37.
  • 2020. Nowell, April and Kurki, Helen. Moving beyond the obstetrical dilemma hypothesis: Birth, weaning and infant care in the Plio-Pleistocene. In The Mother-Infant Nexus in Anthropology: Small Beginnings, Significant Outcomes, edited by Siân Halcrow and Rebecca Gowland. New York: Springer, pp. 173-190.
  • 2020. Chang, Melanie L. and Nowell, April. Conceiving of them, when before there was only us. In Archaeologies of the Heart, edited by Kisha Supernant, Natasha Lyons, Jane Baxter, and Sonya Atalay. New York: Springer, pp. 205-223.