Reno Nims studied anthropology at University of California, Santa Cruz (BA, 2011) where he analyzed animal remains from a 3,000 year old Native Californian village site. He also attended the Abomey Plateau Archaeology Field School in Benin, and volunteered on the Castroville Mammoth Project. After graduation, Reno spent several years working for various cultural resource management programs in Washington, Oregon, the Four Corners of the American Southwest, and onboard the wooden schooner Bill of Rights in southern California. Reno completed his M.S. in Anthropology at Portland State University in 2016 with a thesis project on the role of sablefish in Native northwest fisheries. He then spent five years in Aotearoa New Zealand where he pursued his doctoral research on the archaeology of Māori fisheries at the University of Auckland with funding from Te Pūnaha Matatini, a Centre of Research Excellence.
Research Interests: zooarchaeology; data quality; human-environment relationships; Oceania; coastal archaeology.
Selected Works:
- Nims, Reno, Darby Filimoehala, Melinda S. Allen, and Virginia L. Butler. 2020. When Less is More: Element Selection as Sampling Strategy in Zooarchaeology. Journal of Archaeological Science, 121:105205. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2020.105205
- Campbell, Matthew and Reno Nims. 2019. Small Screens, Small Fish and the Diversity of Pre-European Māori Fish Catches. Journal of Pacific Archaeology. 10(2):43–53.
- Nims, Reno and Virginia L. Butler. 2019. Increasing the Robustness of Meta-Analysis through Life History and Middle Range Models: An Example from the Northeast Pacific. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory. 26:581–618. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-018-9383-1
- Nims, Reno and Virginia L. Butler. 2019. The Sablefish (Anoplopoma fimbria) of Čḯxwicən: Socioenvironmental Lessons from an Unusually Abundant Species. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. 23:1187–1196. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2018.06.028
- Plank, Michael, Melinda S. Allen, Reno Nims, and Thegn N. Ladefoged. 2018. Inferring fishing intensity from contemporary and archaeological size-frequency data. Journal of Archaeological Science. 93:42-53. doi: 10.1016/j.jas.2018.01.011
- Nims, Reno and Virginia L. Butler. 2017. Assessing Reliability in Faunal Analysis Using Blind Tests: A Case Study from Northwestern North America. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, 11:750–761. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2017.01.012
Courses Taught:
- Anth 350/350L Archaeological Method and Theory
- Anth 368U The Archaeology of Oceania
- Anth 460/560 Public and Community Archaeology