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Research

I am broadly interested in the variability in human behaviour: how cultures adapt to similar social problems with vastly different practices, or how cultures grow to have similar practices for drastically different purposes.
My current research endeavors focus on addressing the variability in body modification rituals. My previous research in this area has centered on cultural finger amputation practices, looking at the occurrence of these practices in the ethnographic historical, archaeological, and folktale records. My PhD work focuses on permanent body modification practices more broadly and provides a cross-cultural perspective on the variability of these customs and the cultural motivations for engaging in them.

Publications

Mark Collard and Brea McCauley. 2025. “Religious sacrifice in the Ice Age? On ritual finger amputation as a potential explanation for the Gravettian hand images with incomplete fingers”. In: S. Hussain and G. Dusselforp (Eds). Sitting on the Fence: Negotiating Archaeology, Palaeoanthropology, Anthropology, and Philosophy (p. 163-178). Leiden: Sidestone Press.

Brea McCauley and Mark Collard. 2024. “Finger amputation as a cultural practice: Where, when, who, how, and why”. In: F. Manni & F. D’Errico (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Body Modification. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Brea McCauley, Mark Collard, and Dennis Sandgathe. 2020. A cross-cultural survey of on-site fire use by recent hunter-gatherers: Implications for research on Palaeolithic  pyrotechnology. Journal of Palaeolithic Archaeology, 3, 566-584.

W. Chris Carleton, Brea McCauley, André Costopoulos, and Mark Collard. 2019. An evolutionary agent-based model casts doubt on Dunnell’s waste hypothesis  for cultural elaboration. STAR: Science and Technology of Archaeological Research, 5(1): 1-17.

Brea McCauley. 2019. “Life expectancy in hunter-gatherers”. In: T. Shackelford & V. Weeked-Shackelford (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological   Science. Springer, Cham.

Brea McCauley, David Maxwell, and Mark Collard. 2018. A cross-cultural perspective on Upper Palaeolithic hand images with missing phalanges. Journal of Palaeolithic Archaeology, 1(4): 314-333.