About me

Plants are fundamental component of the human experience. We interact with plants and their products and byproducts on a hourly basis. Our homes, clothing, medicine, food, fuel, transportation, decoration (the list goes on and on), all utilize plants in some way or another. As such, I believe understanding how we as a species came to be so interconnected with plants is vitally important to understanding how we have settled the entire planet and the impacts of our actions on our and the planet’s future. Currently, I am targeting a specific aspect of our human-plant past, mainly the role of plant cultivation in facilitating resilience and persistence in extreme ecologies. I explore themes of labor management, time and energy investment, land modification, and community choice through the lens of paleoethnobotany and plant stable isotope analysis.

My previous work includes exploring barley, sedge and grass production in Viking Age Iceland and numerous historical archaeology projects in New England, USA. I currently work on assemblages from agropastoral sites from Bronze Age Inner Asia – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Western China and Tibet.

Paleoethnobotany [old-people-plants] is the study of preserved plant remains from archaeological sites. There are a number of specializations within this field, and I focus on the macrobotanical remains – the things you can see with your naked eye or a low-powered microscope. These generally are seeds, wood, fiber, and nuts preserved through the process of charring.

Courses Taught:

• What makes a meal: Anthropological explorations of food production, consumption, and performance (Instructor of Record)
• Introduction to Cultural Anthropology (Instructor of Record)
• Introduction to Archaeology (Instructor of Record)
• Paleoethnobotany and Ethnobotany (Assistant Instructor)
• Culture and Environment (Assistant Instructor)
• Introduction to GIS for Anthropologists (Assistant Instructor)
• Warfare and Violence (Assistant Instructor)