Charles Perreault

Charles Perreault is an assistant professor at the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University. He earned his doctorate in anthropology from University of California at Los Angeles in 2011, and was an Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute from 2011 to 2013, before serving as a faculty member at the University of Missouri. Perreault joined ASU in 2014.

Major focuses of Perreault's work lay at the intersection of archaeology and evolutionary anthropology. He works to better understand how archaeological data can contribute to cultural evolution theory, much in the same way that paleontology interacts with genetics theory. Thus, he is particularly interested in how cultural evolution processes unfold at both the micro and the macro scale, and how one can transit between these two different observational scales.

In addition, his current research includes taking advantage of the large-scale nature of the archaeological record in order to parameterize our models of cultural evolution -- estimating the pace of cultural evolution as seen in the archaeological record, and comparing it to rates of biological evolution as seen in the fossil record.

Finally, Perrault is interested in interrogating the nature of the archaeological record itself, asking, "What is the temporal scale of the archeological record?" and "What processes affect the scale of archaeological data and restrict the kind of research questions we can ask?"