California State University, Sacramento

Faculty Member, Anthropology

Other Affiliations: University of California, Santa Cruz, Anthropology
University of Washington, Anthropology

Assistant Professor, NAGPRA Director

Social Sciences and Interdisciplinary Studies

Thesis Title: Costly Signaling and Changing Faunal Abundances at Five Finger Ridge, Utah

About

I use a combination of human behavioral ecology and zooarchaeology to understand past human-environment interactions and the decision-making processes that occurs during foraging and subsequent sharing and cooking. I use this approach in a number of regions in western US, including Great Basin, California, Southwest, and the Northwest.

My dissertation, as it was originally conceived, attempts to identify costly signaling forms of hunting using spatial distribution of faunal combined with stable isotopes to determine the relative costs of game acquisition. Ultimately, while much of the costly signaling model could not be addressed, the faunal and isotope data provided important information regarding animal responses to climate change at the local level (especially leporids and mountain sheep). The fauna also showed interesting patterns in regards to taphonomy, with extremely high variability in survivorship among different locations within the site and between different taxa. As a result, the relative taxonomic abundances between structures was determined simply be the relative degree of destruction across taxa, and not real behavioral differences in terms of hunting and sharing.

I have also been working on predicting and identifying culinary processing at Antelope Cave, a Virgin Anasazi site in northwestern Arizona. The fauna is dominated by jackrabbits, and various data are used to show that these were processed very intensively.

As the NAGPRA Director at Sacramento State University, most of my time is spent working on repatriation efforts and bringing our extensive archaeological collections up to speed with modern curation standards.

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