My brother and I in South Gardiner, Maine
About Me
I grew up in rural Maine, where I spent most days in the woods with my brother looking for hidden creatures and treasures—snakes and turtles, abandoned farm equipment, and old soda bottles. As an undergraduate at the University of Southern Maine, that same curiosity led me to zooarchaeology, with its unique blend of detective work, 3D puzzling, evolutionary theory, and cross-cultural thinking. Today, I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in zooarchaeology at the University of Oxford.
My research has taken me around the world, from Uzbekistan to Zimbabwe, where I’ve studied people who lived over 20,000 years ago. By investigating how they related to and interacted with animals and the environment, my goal is to understand how past societies navigated major climatic and cultural transformations, revealing long-term patterns of resilience that aren’t always visible in our everyday lives.
During my PhD at Washington University in St. Louis (2014-2020), I analyzed over 130,000 animal bones from a 26,000-year-old rock shelter in Somalia and co-directed pioneering fieldwork along the shoes of Lake Victoria in Uganda. Alongside this research, I taught courses on topics ranging from climate change to human evolution. Working with students challenged me to communicate complex scientific concepts to diverse audiences—a commitment that continues to shape my work today.
Since joining Oxford's School of Archaeology in 2021, my research has focused primarily on Great Zimbabwe where I’ve contributed to narratives about the ancient city that foreground local African ways of understanding and engaging with the world. As part of the ERC-funded New Bantu Mosaics Project, I'm now expanding this work across southern Africa to explore how the spread of farming reshaped communities and environments over the last 2,000 years.
I am also involved in long-term collaborations at sites across eastern and northern Africa. These projects span multiple countries and time periods—with the common goal of understanding when and why societies and cultures change. More broadly, I am interested in the origins of human diversity and how it has contributed to our success as a species. This deep-time perspective allows me to engage with ongoing issues related to climate change, food security, and biodiversity conservation, particularly as they relate to human flexibility and innovation.
For more information, see my CV.
Excavating at Great Zimbabwe