My research interests are broad in scope, focusing geographically on Mesoamerica and the southeastern United States, and thematically on general foodways studies, including the origins and maintenance of agricultural systems and the overlap between gender and food-related activities.  Methodologically, I am interested in integrating both zooarchaeological and archaeobotanical data to achieve a fuller understanding of past subsistence practices.  It is my belief that subsistence studies need to incorporate a more complementary approach through the dual consideration of both plant and animal data.  I am currently conducting survey and excavation research with my colleague Dr. Philip Arnold (supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation) at the Classic-period site of Teotepec, located in the Sierra de los Tuxtlas, southern Veracruz, Mexico.  This ambitious field project will document the role of Teotepec in the broader Mesoamerican exchange system that is a hallmark of the Classic period. 

My recent book, Farming, Hunting and Fishing in the Olmec World (2006, University of Texas Press), examines the relationship between agricultural intensification and the emergence of political complexity among the Formative Olmec, in Gulf Coastal Mexico.  My analyses of archaeobotanical, zooarchaeological, and stable carbon/nitrogen isotopic data from two farming villages in the Sierra de los Tuxtlas, approximately 100km northeast of the Olmec heartland, have revealed a period of agricultural intensification linked to both social and environmental factors.  Both zooarchaeological and archaeobotanical evidence indicate that rural farmers began to intensify maize production during the Late Formative (400 BC—AD 100), a period marked by the emergence of both social inequality and the first regional political center.  Volcanic eruptions at the end of the Late Formative and throughout the subsequent Terminal Formative (AD 100-300) led to massive regional depopulation.  Zooarchaeological analysis indicates that this was a time of increasing agricultural risk—people extended their hunting ranges and diversified both the types of prey they captured and the habitats they exploited.  Nevertheless, archaeobotanical and stable carbon/nitrogen evidence suggests that many farmers remained in the Tuxtlas and continued to intensify maize production.  Thus, the initial intensification of maize production coincided with the rise of regional leaders and was likely a product of tribute mobilization encouraged by these rising elites.  After repeated volcanic activity in the region following the emergence of regional chiefdoms, however, continued maize intensification appears to have been a product of risk management related to increasing environmental circumscription.

My research in the southeastern United States has focused on a variety of topics, including identity, gender, feasting, and regional biogeography.  Dr. Margaret Scarry and I have recently collaborated on a paper in which we consider differences between menus of everyday household meals and larger community events as they relate to changing group identity among the Sara Indians.  Our examination of the plant data from the Upper Saratown site in the North-Central Piedmont of North Carolina suggests that the Sara may have dealt with the social and physical stress of European contact by focusing their traditional events around traditional staple foods as a means to reinforce group identity.  My analyses of plant and animal remains from Coweeta Creek, a protohistoric Cherokee site in southwestern North Carolina, suggest that women processed and prepared food in public space surrounding the townhouse, a traditionally male-centered area.  These results indicate that male and female domains, and possibly power structures, overlapped significantly more than originally presumed.  I also conducted a re-analysis of the faunal material from the Toqua site, a late Mississippian mound center in eastern Tennessee.  This analysis identified a locus of feasting activity on an elite residential mound—the nature of the deposit suggests that this feast was an elite-sponsored event geared towards the reinforcement of status distinctions.

• Archaeology of the New World
• Complex societies, Political Economy, Gender Studies
• Subsistence Strategies, Zooarchaeology, Paleoethnobotany
• Prehistoric Foodways, Agriculture, Human Ecology
• Environmental Archaeology, Biogeography