My field projects include investigations of:

• long-term culture-climate interactions in the Chicama Valley on the north coast of Peru,
• the effects of landscape taphonomy on use of archaeological radiocarbon assemblages as population proxies in Utah’s Bonneville Basin,
• landscape engineering that formed part of the early ceremonial complex of Chavín de Huántar in Peru, and
• the environmental contexts of early experimentation with agriculture in Jordan’s Wadi al-Hasa (at the Neolithic sites of el-Hemmeh and Sharara).

My work on digital and quantitative modeling focuses on understanding the consequences of environmental change at human spatial and temporal scales.  Using spatially-explicit modeling to integrate archaeological, geoarchaeological, and paleoenvironmental data, I work to understand both the effects of changing climates on human communities and the long-term legacies of anthropogenic environmental changes.  My research in Jordan, for example, maps fragmented paleosurfaces in order to reconstruct Early Holocene landscapes, model early experiments with cultivation and domestication, and assess human landscape impacts in the early Neolithic.  In Provence I use a variety of modeling approaches to explore the impacts of Holocene climate changes on potential agricultural productivity and use GIS and other tools to analyze settlement patterns for evidence of those impacts.

Past projects include:

• landscapes of long-term resource extraction (at the Quispisisa obsidian source in the Peruvian Central Andes and at the Stélida chert source on the Greek island of Naxos,
• development of methods for quantifying the damage done by looting of archaeological sites, with test cases in Jordan and Peru, and
• exploration of simulated data to evaluate the use of summed probability distributions from assemblages of ¹⁴C dates as population proxies.

 

• National Science Foundation Grant (PI with Brian Codding, co-PI) Collaborative Research: Improved Taphonomic Correction of Past Population Dynamics (Award 1921013)
• National Science Foundation Grant (co-PI with Ben Vining [PI] and Aubrey Hilman [co-PI]) Collaborative Research: Coupling and Cohesion as Factors Affecting Vulnerability to Abrupt Climate Change (Award 1847131)