My primary research interest is in understanding the complexity of the political
economies of prehistoric foraging/gardening societies, with a geographic focus on Eastern
North American, particularly the Mississippi River drainage of the Eastern Woodlands. An
early interest in the Archaic period (ca. 6000-3000 bp) has given way to a concentration
on Middle Woodland "Hopewellian" cultures (ca. 2050-1550 bp). Much of our
knowledge of social and political life in this period comes from the analysis of mounds
and linear earthworks concentrated at "ceremonial" gathering sites, which
create a landscape of communities (consisting of shifting networks of differing size and
composition) and which were an integral part of the complex social world of a population
otherwise dispersed in small hamlets. A complete political economy of Middle Woodland
societies requires investigation of the hamlets as well, and I am currently analyzing the
material recovered during the ca. 1980 Smiling Dan site CRM excavation by the Center for
American Archeology. I am also interested in the history and theory of archaeology and
how we construct archaeological knowledge.
A set of secondary interests--human evolution and skeletal biology--stems from my
concentration on biological anthropology in graduate school. My first academic
appointment was as lecturer in the Department of Cell Biology and Anatomy in the Medical
School at Northwestern University. Following that, and before coming to Wesleyan, I was
the Leverhulme Visiting Fellow in the Department of Archaeology and Prehistory at the
University of Sheffield, where I taught courses on mortuary archaeology and
paleopathology.
Eastern Woodland Prehistory
Method and Theory