I investigate human/hominin behavior, with a particular interest in the environmental and social factors that influences shifts in social connectivity, mobility, subsistence strategies, and material culture. I am interested in archaeological site formation as a product of interactions between human societies, local ecologies, and post-depositional processes. My methods include zooarchaeology, archaeological science, and experimental archaeology to untangle site formation process and human behavior.
I have participated in projects ranging from Middle Stone Age to Medieval contexts across South Africa, Malawi, Italy, Mongolia, Romania, and the USA. My Masters’ thesis examined proxies for nutritional stress in Later Stone Age populations along the South African coastline during interstadial/glacial transitions.
My dissertation, titled: “A taphonomic framework for ostrich eggshell in archaeology: Implications for human behavior, social complexity, and ostrich-human interactions,” offers a pathway for building strong inferential theory for interpreting ostrich eggshell in archaeological contexts. I approach ostrich eggshell from a zooarchaeological perspective, and apply Middle Range Theory to construct actualistic studies that address how anthropogenic and post-depositional processes shape our interpretation of OES. I applied this approach to ostrich eggshell from the Kasitu Valley of Malawi to examine human response to changing resource distributions in the terminal Pleistocene.