Research interests: During my graduate and postdoctoral training at Memorial University
of Newfoundland, University of Calgary, and University of Haifa, I developed a strong
interest in clarifying localized human-environment dynamics in marginal settings using
approaches that crosscut anthropology, geoarchaeology, and ecology. Archaeological
tracking of feedback among changing social, cultural, and environmental conditions
over the long-term is a powerful way of modelling prospective socio-ecological resilience
and vulnerabilities in fragile regions. My research on this subject primarily emphasizes
consiliences among archaeological and sedimentary archives in order to understand
resource management and land-use in harsh frontier environments. I have collaborated
on projects that include a wide range of northern people and environments, from Inuit
pioneers in the Torngat Mountains, ancient Athabaskan caribou hunters of the Barrenlands,
to the Mesolithic fishers of Lapland.
My current research investigates human/wildlife adaptations to pressured environments
in eastern Beringia. This interdisciplinary collaboration contributes to reconciling
archaeological and terrestrial/limnological palaeoecological records in the Tanana
Basin of central Alaska. Our work tracks boreal wetland responses to environmental
and climactic shifts. Archives from the Upward Sun River, Mead, Delta River Overlook,
Gerstle River, and Broken Mammoth sites and their environs are used to a) map spatiotemporal
interplay among wetland, dune field, shrub-tundra, and forest mosaics, b) pinpoint
the impacts of changing wetland health on local biodiversity, and c) delineate how
waterfowl availability and mutable wetland marginality contributed to diversifying
people’s adaptive strategies in the region.
Additional projects I am collaborating on include characterizing site formation processes
at a Subarctic sand dune site, identifying proxy signatures for ancient northern anadromous
salmon fisheries, exploring the contribution of wetland eutrophication to the onset
of high-latitude agriculture, and highlighting community-scale responses collapsing
agropastoral niches in the southeastern borderlands of the Byzantine Empire.
