Profile

I am an environmental archaeologist interested in long-term relationships between people, foodways, and landscapes. Much of my ongoing research focuses on people’s interactions with plants and changing environments during and since the late Pleistocene in North America. I use approaches from archaeobotany, palynology, and parasitology to investigate these dynamics. 

I am currently involved with fieldwork and collections-based research projects throughout the Great Basin and Columbia Plateau. As Director of the Museum of Natural and Cultural History’s Great Basin Archaeology Field School, I am the Principal Investigator of research at the Connley Caves, a place in central Oregon where Indigenous communities intermittently resided for more than 12,500 years. I am also working on collaborative projects examining sediment cores from Paulina Marsh in Oregon, a legacy collection from Lind Coulee in Washington, and coprolites from Last Supper Cave and Bonneville Estates Rockshelter in Nevada. 

In partnership with members of the Klamath Tribes and the University of Nevada, Reno, I am working on the Traditional Nutrition Project to understand diet related health in the past and present. The goal of the project is to develop a nutritional database for First Foods in the Great Basin through biannual harvesting events that will concurrently function to strengthen relationships between Tribal members and anthropologists while encouraging Indigenous perspectives, values, and practices.