Major: Archaeology

Minor: Ecological anthropology

Area of Study: The Northern Rocky Mountains (Canada and Montana), Northern Australia

Method: Dendrochronology, GIS, Archaeology, Ethnography

Laboratories: Fire and Restoration Ecology Laboratory  and  Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research

With the sweeping decimation of bison and native American populations in the 1800s, did fire regimes change at the forest-grassland boundaries?  I am investigating how small-scale landscape patches once produced by bison and indigenous burning may have given way to a more homogenous landscape more prone to large-scale, high-intensity fires.
 
My other interests include remote sensing, hunter-gatherers, trophic cascades, pyric herbivory, pyrodendrochronology, problems of time and perspective in ecological anthropology, shifting baselines, and other human-animal-fire relationships.

Keywords: Historical ecology, fire ecology, dendrochronology, fire scars, hunter-gatherers, problems of time and perspective in ecological anthropology, shifting baselines, coupled socio-ecological systems, human-animal relationships, secondary adaptations (reactive foraging), paleoclimatology. Bridging archaeology with the ethnographic and ecological present; applied anthropology.