About Me

There's nothing like the thrill of holding a fractured projectile point, potsherd, or shell bead and knowing you're the first person to do so in thousands of years. Who made this object? Where did they come from, and how did they live? What did it mean to them and how did it end up here?  These fundamental questions of archaeology have driven me since my first adolescent field season.

​Working on projects from New Hampshire to Micronesia, I developed a  particular interests in how people adapted when faced with novel environments, how they changed those environments, and the tools -- especially stone tools -- they used to do it. Today, I pursue those questions in Chachapoyas, Peru. This region in northeastern Peru spans the transition from high Andean grasslands to Amazon rainforest, offering unique ecology and culture history. Almost nothing is known about the lives of prehistoric peoples there from initial colonization more than 12,000 years ago to the development of agricultural villages about 2,000 years ago.  I'm changing that.

Experimental flintknapping, 2017