I am a zooarchaeologist interested in the origins and effects of agriculture and domestication and am especially interested in the evolutionary and social processes influencing and enabling their development. I use faunal demographic reconstruction, stable isotopic analyses, and ethnoarchaeology to better understand the many contexts out of which domestication arose, as well as the diversity of regional agricultural practices that resulted. Specifically, my research focusses on the independent domestication of pigs in China and Southwest Asia and the development of foddering and integrative agriculture involving pigs in Neolithic Northern China.
Pigs into Dragons & Humans into Farmers: Studying Pigs, People, and Millet in Neolithic North China