After working as an analytical chemist for Union Carbide, I decided to pursue a career that would help me make sense of the world around me. Chemistry was interesting but day after day working in a laboratory with chemicals was nowhere near as fulfilling as traversing North American learning and teaching about culture.
I completed both masters and doctoral work with the anthropology department of Binghamton University in New York. There I developed expertise in animal bone analyses and Native American cultures.
I began working as an independent bone analyst in 1998 and have worked on assemblages from across the United States. That faunal work was in addition to active research on the Susquehannock Indians of the Susquehanna Valley and the historic town of Port Tobacco Maryland. In 2012, I moved to the Hudson Valley of New York and began research into the cultural costs of reservoir construction for the New York City water system. A decade later, that research was published as the book Taking Our Water for the City.
I have been fortunate enough to serve as a tenure-track professor at two liberal arts colleges, first Heidelberg University and then Vassar College. I received tenure at Vassar in 2017 and was promoted to full professor in 2023. At Vassar, I teach courses on archaeology, forensic anthropology, repatriation, and environmental studies.
I will be on leave from Vassar for all of the 2024/2025 academic year and will be working at the Natural History Museum of Vienna, Austria, in the Spring of 2025. During this Fulbright Fellowship, I will be returning to my roots in zooarchaeology to study the past and future of animal domestication. In a time of climate change, longstanding human-animal relationships will change. I will be exploring how certain species, like that of pigs and rabbits, seem to resist complete domestication by humans. Their stories may help us to avoid domesticating some of the wild species whose habitats are now inseparable from those of humans.
The archaeology that I do does not fit the popular stereotypes of the profession. I rarely excavate and I am more concerned about the present and future than I am about the distant past. My active professional memberships are with the American Anthropological Association (AAA), the Society for American Archaeology (SAA), the Society for Historical Archaeology (SHA), the the Register of Professional Archaeologists (RPA), and the International Council for Archaeozoology (ICAZ). I have served as a Leadership Fellow with the AAA, as a member of the Standards Board for the RPA, as a member of the SAA Committee on Consulting Archaeology and on their Dienje Kenyon Memorial Fellowship committee. In 2023 I joined the board of Historic Huguenot Street, a National Historical Landmark District in New Paltz, NY. In 2024, I am a candidate for the board of the SHA.
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