My research interests revolve around settlement choice, human-environmental interactions, and human adaptations to environmental change. I approach my research in an interdisciplinary manner, and as such have a wide array of interests and methodological expertise. I currently have two major research programs, one focused on Madagascar and another in in the Southeastern United States. In both cases, I am focusing on understanding settlement and mobility patterns and their drivers in different societies. I frame my questions theoretically in terms of complex systems and evolutionary frameworks and incorporate geospatial tools to assist in archaeological data collection and analysis.

Traditional archaeological studies of settlement patterns often assume that people will choose to live in a place because of access to essential natural resources and that, subsequently, people’s choice to settle or move will fluctuate as environmental and resource conditions change. In Madagascar, where I am currently conducting fieldwork, the island’s long history of environmental change, and its peoples’ mobile living strategies with close cultural ties to specific places, challenge these traditional assumptions. By recording past strategies of how people lived in the face of climate instability, we can inform conservation policies and help protect traditional ecological knowledge of local communities in the present.

My research largely relies upon the use of geophysical instruments (remote sensing) and statistical modeling to record and analyze information about the past in a systematic way. In addition to my methods-focused remote sensing work, I am also actively engaged with understanding how environmental conditions through time influence patterns we see in the archaeological record. As such, I am involved with an international collaboration of paleoclimatologists and archaeologists looking at different proxies for climatological changes (including the use of fossilized coral reefs, speleothems, and lake sediments) to produce high-spatial and temporal resolution information to assess with archaeological data.