About

Whittaker Schroder, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Florida. His research interests encompass landscape archaeology, historical and political ecology, sociopolitical organization, resilience and sustainability, household archaeology, remote sensing, cultural heritage, ceramics, and the archaeology of the Americas with a focus on Mesoamerica. He is particularly interested in how individuals and communities create and shape their landscapes to address short-term and long-term socioenvironmental risks, employing frameworks of historical and political ecology that emphasize the reciprocal dynamics between people and the environment. Dr. Schroder directs the Proyecto Arqueológico Bajo Lacantún in southeastern Chiapas, Mexico, investigating long-term urban development, agricultural intensification, and water management in a region associated with the Maya kingdom of Lakamtuun. His work integrates on-the-ground archaeological techniques with remote sensing technologies such as drones, lidar, and photogrammetry, and leverages machine learning, modeling, and data science to analyze large datasets. He is committed to interdisciplinary collaboration, community engagement, and the integration of empirical, quantitative data with interpretive and indigenous knowledge. His contributions include advancing remote sensing applications in archaeology, exploring landscape resilience, and understanding long-term socioenvironmental processes in Mesoamerican contexts.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Archaeology
• Geography
• Artificial Intelligence
• Remote sensing
• Data science
• Political Science
• Engineering
• Geology
• Cognitive science
• Ecology
• Ancient history
• Physical geography
• Environmental resource management
• Civil engineering
• Biology
• Psychology
• History
• Environmental science
• Management science

Selected publications

• Ecological Urbanism and the Lowland Maya Landscape

  University of Utah Press eBooks · 2026-01-30

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• The Promise and Peril of Coastal Infrastructure: Use Life of a Tidal Fish Trap on the Northern Gulf Coast of Florida, circa AD 400–650

  American Antiquity · 2025-10-29 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract The potential of coastal regimes for supporting permanent human settlement is tempered by the vulnerability of fixed infrastructure to changes in sea levels. First-millennium AD civic-ceremonial centers on the northern Gulf coast of Florida involved the construction of permanent infrastructure in support of regional gatherings that challenged sustainable settlement in the context of regressive sea. Although rising sea was the more common challenge over millennia of coastal dwelling, marine regression from periods of cooling climate slowly diminished near-shore habitat for fish and shellfish and eventually stranded settlements from tidal water. The challenge was especially acute for a community that built a tidal fish trap for summer solstice feasts, whose utility depended on the reliability of tides to flood the trap. High-resolution lidar data from the Richards Island fish trap enable accurate modeling of the effectiveness of the trap under current and lowered sea levels. The use-life history of the Richards Island fish trap illustrates the limits to intensification of coastal economies inherent to nonportable infrastructure whose utility is tide dependent—in particular, when demands on production are out of sync with optimal tidal conditions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Promise and Peril of Coastal Infrastructure: Use Life of a Tidal Fish Trap on the Northern Gulf Coast of Florida, circa AD 400–650 – CORRIGENDUM

  American Antiquity · 2025-12-05

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Identification of a Terminal Classic Maya Fine Ware Production Center in the Upper Usumacinta River Drainage, Chiapas, Mexico

  Latin American Antiquity · 2024-11-14 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The archaeological study of craft production investigates the role of household activities in broader social and political networks. In the Maya area, the production and distribution of ceramics, especially prestige ceramics including polychrome and fine ware pottery, relate to broader transformations in Maya society from the Classic to Terminal Classic periods. However, direct evidence for ceramic production in the form of kilns, workshops, or associated detritus can be elusive. We report the identification, excavation, and preliminary analysis of a large deposit of fine paste ceramics, including sherds representative of the Fine Orange and Fine Gray wares in the type-variety system of Maya ceramics, from a household group at the archaeological site of Benemérito de las Américas Primera Sección, located near the confluence of the Lacantún and Usumacinta Rivers. Discarded ceramics from this context exhibit several signs of overfiring consistent with pottery production. This deposit challenges notions of functional versus symbolic activity, as the members of this household used this deposit to dedicate a group of three burials accompanied by offerings including a figurine ensemble. We discuss the implications for this deposit in the context of economic shifts taking place across the Maya Lowlands during this period.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Marken, Damien B. and M. Charlotte Arnauld (2023) <scp><i>Building an Archaeology of Maya Urbanism: Planning and Flexibility in the American Tropics</i></scp>, University Press of Colorado (Denver, CO), xvi + 476 pp. £100.01 hbk.

  Bulletin of Latin American Research · 2024-11-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In this extensive volume, the editors Damien Marken and M. Charlotte Arnauld have invited contributors to reconsider the development of archaeological lowland Maya urbanism as a dynamic process involving complex and long-term strategies by city dwellers to create, plan and modify the diverse patterns in the built environment that manifest across the urban landscape of the Yucatán peninsula. The heterogeneity of Maya cities and their ecological contexts have compelled researchers to develop different models to explain Maya urbanism through the lenses of low-density urbanism, garden cities, agrarian economies and segmentary states, among others. The contributors to this volume, therefore, have adopted bottom-up perspectives to address the generative planning of Maya cities through community and residential decisions, which are potentially more accessible to researchers with emerging technologies like lidar that can effectively map large swathes of landscapes within a matter of days; the interpretation of these datasets, of course, takes considerably more time. The editors have built off several influential models of Mesoamerican urbanism in organising this volume, identifying settlement processes to structure the volume into three parts, despite the clear overlap across categories. Chapters 2–5 concern “Community Formation,” how communities are formed and transformed over time. Chapters 6–9 encompass “Household Decisions, Mobility, and Connectivity,” centring the decisions of households and communities in urban change. Chapters 10–13 discuss “City-Scale Resource Use and Management,” highlighting the agrarian organisation of Maya cities, the tensions between bottom-up and centralised management and the cumulative development of intensive agriculture. These chapters are bookended by the editors' introduction summarising the history and current state of Maya urban studies and a conclusion (Part 4) offering a comparative approach from the perspective of Amazonian archaeology by John Walker. Part 1, Chapter 2 appropriately begins with the origins of Maya urbanism around 1000 BCE at Ceibal, Guatemala. By tracing collective ritual action through the dedication, burial and expansion of public spaces, Triadan and Inomata explore a critical period in Maya history as mobile populations began to adopt a more sedentary lifestyle. In Chapter 3, however, Garrison stresses the continued importance of mobility as a royal and household strategy during later periods of Maya history. Garrison offers an opportunity to reconcile bottom-up and top-down approaches, adopting the emic Maya concept of kaj, meaning “to settle” or “to resettle,” providing epigraphic context to the archaeological evidence for dynastic movement across the Buenavista Valley, Guatemala. In a similar fashion, Chapter 4 investigates “a city in flux” at the site of El Perú-Waka', Guatemala. Eppich and colleagues discuss how hinterland inhabitants interacted with historical and ecological challenges. Rounding out the history of prehispanic Maya cities, Chapter 5 focuses on the Postclassic period centre of Chichen Itza. Stanton and colleagues view the florescence of Chichen Itza as a Maya strategy to rebuild the “Flower World” paradise, taking inspiration from the great Highland city of Teotihuacan that loomed large in Maya worldviews even after its decline. Part 2 consists of 4 chapters that explore similar themes of bottom-up, household decision making and mobility. Arnauld and Dzul Góngora (Chapter 6) discuss “residential contraction” at Río Bec that may have led to a loss in urban connectivity. Thompson and Prufer (Chapter 7) explore the household diversity across neighbourhoods in Southern Belize by tracing the development of inequality. Hiquet and colleagues (Chapter 8) trace changes in growth and contraction of household contexts in relation to the history of the site of Naachtun. In Part 3, Murtha (Chapter 10) adopts a landscape urbanism approach, breaking down dichotomies of urban vs. rural and top-down vs. bottom-up. Murtha contextualises his research at Tikal with how archaeologists' understandings of Maya cities have changed since the 1960s. Chase (Chapter 11) contrasts household and neighbourhood-level management of agricultural terraces with centralised planning of causeways at Caracol, Belize. In Chapter 12, Liendo Stuardo and Campiani investigate urban infrastructure at Palenque through studies of accessibility, water management, and neighbourhood planning. Finally, Nondédéo and colleagues (Chapter 13) explore the flexible and diverse agrarian strategies at Naachtun over time. The concluding chapter of the volume that makes up Part 4 by John Walker provides a promising comparative perspective to Maya urbanism from Amazonia. Walker notes the distinct gaps in archaeological understandings of Maya and Amazonian cities, respectively, and how through analogy, our understanding of the origins of urbanism in the Americas can be improved. Building an Archaeology of Maya Urbanism successfully compiles studies from across the Maya lowlands and encourages archaeologists to reconsider urban processes from the perspective of households and communities. Researchers who embrace bottom-up and comparative approaches in urban studies and archaeology will especially appreciate this important contribution to Maya urbanism.

  PublisherDOI

• The Maya Landscape of El Infiernito, Chiapas, Mexico: Comparison of Occupied and Unoccupied Airborne LiDAR Mapping Systems

  Remote Sensing · 2024-11-27

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Landscape-oriented approaches in archaeology have moved beyond site-based research to interpret how people have engaged with, modified, and constructed the environment and how the legacies of these activities continue to influence land use. In the Maya Lowlands, landscape archaeology is related to the analysis of settlement patterns, households, agricultural intensification, and water management. The increasing availability of LiDAR data has revolutionized the mapping of archaeological landscapes under vegetation, especially in tropical environments like the Maya Lowlands, but researchers still emphasize site-oriented settlement densities and infrastructure. Furthermore, the accessibility of drone-based LiDAR platforms has the potential to collect data across several seasons or years to facilitate change detection. In this paper, we compare three LiDAR datasets collected from 2018 to 2023, using both occupied and unoccupied airborne systems. The landscape surrounding the archaeological site of El Infiernito, Chiapas, Mexico near the Classic period (AD 250–800) dynastic capital of Piedras Negras, Guatemala was selected to compare these LiDAR datasets in the context of prior, extensive ground-based fieldwork. These data were used to interpret the built environment, land use, hydrology, landscapes of movement, and other infrastructure constructed and modified by several communities beginning in the Late Preclassic period (400 BC–AD 250) to the present. When used alongside systematic survey and ground verification, the combination of several LiDAR platforms to collect data across different seasons at El Infiernito enhanced the understanding of the spatial distribution of archaeological sites and features across the karst landscape.

  PublisherDOI

• :<i>Construction of Maya Space: Causeways, Walls, and Open Areas from Ancient to Modern Times</i>

  Journal of Anthropological Research · 2024-11-20

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Google Earth Engine for archaeologists: An updated look at the progress and promise of remotely sensed big data

  Journal of Archaeological Science Reports · 2023-07-10 · 19 citations

  articleOpen access

  A wealth of remotely sensed data has accumulated over the past several decades and now constitutes an analytical resource primed for archaeological applications. To date, remotely sensed big data (RSBD) analytics in archaeology have focused on filling spatial gaps in the distribution of sites and features, characterizing environmental landscapes, and monitoring cultural heritage sites. The scientific promise of these data to expand our understanding of past human-environment interactions has not been fully realized. Limitations of data access, sufficient analytical and computational resources, and methodological awareness and education on the appropriate use of RSBD have limited the adoption and widespread use of RSBD in archaeology, despite its ubiquity in the Earth sciences. Google Earth Engine (GEE) is a freely available planetary-scale cloud computing platform that addresses the perennial challenges of data access, analysis, and computing power that are particularly acute among archaeologists aiming to derive insights from RSBD. GEE lowers the barrier to entry for analyzing RSBD, expanding the potential for these data in the automated identification of archaeological features through deep learning; fieldwork planning and archaeological practice; modeling of past environments and environmental variability; and cultural heritage impact and risk assessments. In doing so, it also contributes to open science via increased access, transparency, and reproducibility.

  PublisherDOI

• Regional household variation and inequality across the Maya landscape

  Journal of Anthropological Archaeology · 2023-10-07 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Exploring the Role of AI in Urban Design Research: A Comparative Analysis of Analogical and Machine Learning Approaches

  The Plan Journal · 2023 · 7 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Science
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• A. Scherer

  Brown University

  23 shared

• Charles J. Golden

  Children's Hospital of Orange County

  17 shared

• Timothy Murtha

  University of North Carolina at Charlotte

  17 shared

• Omar Alcover Firpi

  9 shared

• Shanti Morell‐Hart

  Brown University

  7 shared

• Alejandra Roche Recinos

  Reed College

  6 shared

• Mallory E. Matsumoto

  The University of Texas at Austin

  5 shared

• Eben N. Broadbent

  University of Florida

  5 shared

Education

• PhD, Anthropology

  University of Pennsylvania

• BA, Anthropology

  Brown University

  2009

• BA, Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World

  Brown University

  2009

Awards & honors

• Dumbarton Oaks Research Grant (PI), “The Lower Lacantún Rive…
• Gerda Henkel Foundation Research Grant (PI), “Risk, Resilien…
• NASA (19-IDS19-0060) (Postdoc and co-PI; with T. Murtha, PI;…
• National Science Foundation (BCS #1917671) (Postdoc; with C.…
• National Science Foundation (BCS #1849921) (Postdoc; with T.…