My work uses geoarchaeological approaches to answer questions about landscape evolution and long-term human-environment relationships. I am interested in understanding how people adapt to dynamic landscape environments, including how a changing landscape affects human societies, as well as how people alter their physical landscape. I am especially interested in prehistoric agriculture and land use in the Southwest US/Northwest Mexico. 

 

My dissertation research is on the Southern Colorado Plateau in Northeastern Arizona, where I am looking at the relationship between Ancestral Pueblo agricultural groups and settlement patterns within an eolian landscape. I am using soil geomorphology, geochronology, micromorphology, soil chemistry, and spatial analyses to understand the quality of eolian soils for agriculture, site formation processes in a dynamic eolian environment, and the long-term use of a marginal landscape by successful agriculturists. 

 

My previous research included work at La Playa archaeology site in Sonora, Mexico, to understand the site formation processes of an early agricultural site on a fine-grained alluvial floodplain.