The University of New Mexico

Graduate Student, Anthropology

Ph.D. Candidate

About

My long term interest is on better understanding how global climate change will affect human societies. To this end, the best way to understand our own vulnerabilities to climate change is to understand how to past human societies have been affected by climate processes. Archaeology provides the only approach to synthesize a history of both paleoclimate and human behavior.

However, there is a methodological stumbling block on this path - archaeologists are dependent upon regional records of climate change. This is fine, but additional specificity is sometimes desired. For my dissertation research, I've focused on developing an approach to use Δ13C from radiocarbon-dated charcoal to facilitate the development of paleoclimate records at the same resolution as the data archaeologists use to infer past human behavior. This approach has been spun off to pollen analysis as well - Δ13C from radiocarbon-dated pollen provides a regional record of paleoclimate that has some predictive power over mean annual precipitation.

An additional focus is on the use of Bayesian inference to tie together change in paleoclimate records. All to often, paleoclimate time series data is a set of wavy lines over time with no statement of significance for hypothesized points of change. Bayesian change-point analysis can help develop probability statements as to the significance of a given change-point. This has some interesting implications for how paleoclimate records can be compared and contrasted.

I also worked on e x-ray fluorescence in archaeological data collection, particularly in assessing whether or not the portable varieties hold up to the standard laboratory devices.