About Me

There's nothing like holding a fractured projectile point, potsherd, or shell bead in your hand and knowing you're the first person to do so for thousands of years. Who last held this object, and what was their life like? Where did they come from, and how did they live? How was this item made and how did it end up here? Archaeological science endeavors to answer these and similar questions about the people and objects of the past all around the world.

Within anthropological archaeology, I specialize in how humans in the deep past interacted with their environments, adapting to and altering the landscapes on which they lived. Although I have participated in projects from Alaska to Micronesia, most of work in centered on the cloud forests of the Peruvian eastern Andes. At the intersection of the Andes mountains and the Amazonian rainforest, early human activity in these environments has proven remarkably elusive. Through a combination of ethnographically-informed survey, excavation, and quantitative modeling, my team and I are working to understand the first people to live in the Peruvian cloud forests more than 5,000 years ago, as well as the transition to agricultural sedentism and the role cloud forests played in highland-lowland interactions.

Rainy season fieldwork, 2023