Brief Description of Education & Experience
I graduated with my PhD in Anthropology in Summer 2022 with the Center for the Study of the First Americans (CSFA), Texas A&M University. I am currently a Lead Archaeologist and PI at SWCA Environmental Consultants. I have experience at the Arkansas Archaeological Survey affiliated with The University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, and was previously a visiting adjunct professor at Arkansas Tech University teaching courses in introductory anthropology and cultural anthropology, and experience as a primary graduate instructor at Texas A&M University teaching introductory courses in anthropology, cultural anthropology, and archaeology. I am a four-field trained anthropological archaeologist with thirteen years of field experience, six years’ experience as a crew chief and lab director, and three years’ experience as a PI. My theoretical basis and research interests are rooted in prehistoric hunter-gatherer technological organization, environmental archaeology, and diachronic interaction of paleoecological adaptations, landscape learning, and human behavioral adaptation. My published research and field experiences investigates behavioral adaptations of the first Indigenous peoples to settle into North America via the Bering Land Bridge evident in the Alaskan archaeological record and how these peoples, and their descendants, learned the local lithic landscape while adapting to millennia of shifting paleoclimatic regimes from the late Pleistocene through the middle Holocene. My specific research specialties include systematic regional geological survey, geochemical (portable X-Ray fluorescence) lithic sourcing of volcanic materials (rhyolites, basalts, andesites, dacites and perlites), advanced lithic analysis, and paleoecology of periglacial environments. I have additional experience in the study of site formation processes and geoarchaeology of subarctic environments from my history of working at various sites in the subarctic as well as statistical analysis and lithic petrography. I have seven years’ experience working with CRM archaeologists and government agencies on Alaskan military lands. I served as co-PI at Little Panguingue Creek, a site in interior Alaska resulting in multiple reports and publications as well as running an Alaskan Field School for Texas A&M University. In addition, I have experience conducting independent geological surveys in remote regions of interior Alaska. I have experience working in Belize, Texas, Russia and Arkansas.
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