RESEARCH AREAS
Anthropological Archaeology
I study human–environment interactions across multiple scales, from life history and demography to population dynamics and biogeography, both in past and present, in the field and in the lab. While much of my research centers on hunter-gatherers and small-scale societies, my broader interest is in identifying the fundamental principles driving the evolutionary diversification of human ecology across time and space. This often involves comparative analyses across cultures and species, with a particular focus on how humans use energy and information to compute adaptive solutions for navigating and transforming their environments.
My archaeological research focuses on hunter-gatherer paleoecology, the initial colonization of the Americas, and the lifeways of Paleoindian societies in North America. I am especially interested in how humans adapted to diverse North American landscapes during the late Pleistocene and subsequently diversified across the continent. In collaboration with colleagues, I recently completed a multi-year excavation program at Bonfire Shelter, Texas, and am currently conducting research on early Paleoindian occupations in the central Rio Grande Rift Valley, New Mexico.
My archaeological research focuses on hunter-gatherer paleoecology, the initial colonization of the Americas, and the lifeways of Paleoindian societies in North America. I am especially interested in how humans adapted to diverse North American landscapes during the late Pleistocene and subsequently diversified across the continent. In collaboration with colleagues, I recently completed a multi-year excavation program at Bonfire Shelter, Texas, and am currently conducting research on early Paleoindian occupations in the central Rio Grande Rift Valley, New Mexico.
Complex Adaptive Human Systems
The human world is rich, dynamic, and diverse. Human societies are formally complex adaptive systems characterized by nonequilibrium dynamics, nonlinear interactions, hierarchical organization, and modular networks of evolving correlations across time and space. My research draws on data from multiple disciplines, including ethnography, ethnology, archaeology, ecology, economics, and environmental science, to investigate the structure and dynamics of these systems.
My approach to theory-building is mathematical and statistical: I develop formal models to generate hypotheses that yield testable predictions, which I evaluate using statistical methods and empirical data. I am particularly interested in inference, information theory, energetics, and theories of computation, as well as the emerging role of machine learning in anthropology for exploring the evolution and ecology of complex adaptive human systems.
My approach to theory-building is mathematical and statistical: I develop formal models to generate hypotheses that yield testable predictions, which I evaluate using statistical methods and empirical data. I am particularly interested in inference, information theory, energetics, and theories of computation, as well as the emerging role of machine learning in anthropology for exploring the evolution and ecology of complex adaptive human systems.
Philosophy of Anthropology
In the anthropological sciences, we too often overlook the deeper metaphysical frameworks that shape how we observe and interpret the world. It is crucial to recognize that our models of inference emerge from underlying ontological assumptions and their associated epistemological commitments. Just as importantly, we must take seriously how anthropologists make inferences about other humans—past and present—as they navigate their environments and encode learned solutions into technologies, institutions, and behaviors: the stuff of culture. From this perspective, anthropology becomes an exercise in reverse engineering the generative mechanisms that produce the cultural and ecological variation we observe, variation that is ultimately encoded in data. My aim as an anthropologist is to construct theories that illuminate not only the evolving complexity of human systems over time and space but also the structure of the universe in which those systems are embedded.
