Officially ABD!

It's been a busy spring!

On April 26, I successfully defended my dissertation proposal, entitled "Early Prehistoric Human Ecology in Chachapoyas, Peru." I spoke to a (virtual) room of my archaeological community (my peers, professors, mentors, and friends), explaining my plan to evaluation the suitability of that region in the ceja de selva--the transition zone between the Andes mountains and the Amazon rainforest--for occupation by prehistoric hunter-gatherers. I answered questions and got a lot of good advice. Although the University of Michigan curators recommended a few changes, they approved the project, making me officially ABD (All But Dissertation)!

The same week, I finished my year-long Foreign Language Area Scholarship, studying Quechua, the native language of the Inca, under the incomparable Adela Carlos-Rios. (A full post on that is forthcoming.)

In May, I took some time off on account of work-life balance. Still, I found out my first-ever academic paper has been accepted with revisions to my stretch journal (WOOHOO!) and got some modeling done for a project my lab group is working on.

Now, I'm writing this from a hotel in Anchorage, Alaska. Since the public health and political situations in Peru make working there impossible this summer, I found a job for a firm doing contract archaeology on a highway construction project up here. I miss Peru so much, but I'm looking forward to getting my hands in the dirt after way too long, and it promises to be an interesting project; it's a site-dense area, and we'll be doing primarily excavation of sites located in the project area in previous phases of work.

A screenshot from my Zoom defense.