Projects
Paleoecology of Early Maya Agriculture
Our work aims at understanding how past environmental and climate conditions influenced the appearance of the first agricultural economies in the eastern Maya lowlands. I have examined this question through isotopic dietary analyses of human burials from the Belize Valley region to characterize when and how climate stress influenced diet choice through time. I am currently expanding my research to examine when the farmers appear in the Belize Valley, and what conditions influenced this adaptation.
Combining techniques in lidar (light detection and ranging) remote sensing and paleoecology with archaeology, our work systematically investigates the subsistence and settlement patterns of Late Archaic peoples in the Belize Valley, targeting rockshelters for excavation. Field research began in Summer 2022 and will continue in future field seasons.
We are also conducting stable isotope analyses of environmental samples (vegetation, water, rocks, animal remains) and archaeological samples (faunal), important indicators of these past regional ecological patterns and processes, will aid in the creation of regional isoscape (isotopic+landscapes) models, based on the spatial distribution of isotopic data.
CAMBIO: Caribbean & Mesoamerica Biogeochemical Isotope Overview
CAMBIO is a collaborative effort led by Early Career researchers working in Latin America, the US, and Europe to systematically compile published isotopic data in an open-access and multilingual format (Spanish, French, and English). CAMBIO collects stable isotope data from archaeological sites across Mesoamerica and the Caribbean that are sensitive to the past diet and mobility of humans. The project has started with data from human biological remains but will expand to include data from other animals and plants. As the largest repository for human isotopic measurements from the Caribbean and Mesoamerica, analyses of data in CAMBIO have the potential to address significant questions about different cultural developments (origins of agriculture, urbanism, movement and migration) from the Paleoindian period through Colonial times. The human dataset for CAMBIO is in its final stages of completion, and once finished will be housed open access made available via the Pandora data platform.
We are continually expanding the CAMBIO. If you are interested in contributing, we would love to hear from you!
Human-Animal Interaction in the Belize Valley
Animals played a central role in ancient Maya life - from serving as sources of food to playing a central role in ritual and ceremonies. We recently began a collaboration with colleagues at Oxford on the Ancient American Dog Project that uses genomic methods to reconstruct prehistoric dog populations and human-dog interaction across the Americas during the last 10,000 years. To supplement aDNA data from samples from our Belize excavations, we are also conducting isotopic analyses to examine the diet and movement of dogs over the course of two-thousand years.
Upper Belize Valley Lidar Analysis
Remote sensing methods for understanding human settlements have become a highly visible part of the scientific toolkit used by archaeologists working around the world in the past two decades. The technological revolution of lidar (light detection and ranging) offers unparalleled opportunities to study the dynamics of the built environment, demographic growth, and past human-environment interaction at regional scales.
Since 2014, I have been engaged with applications of lidar data to examine prehistoric human-landscape interactions. As part of field school training, I have conducted archaeological settlement survey at the site of Cahal Pech based on ground truthing of lidar data. I have also used lidar to document an extensive water management system at the site of Baking Pot. More recently I have been collaborating with other archaeologists to use lidar data to explore variation between Mesoamerican urban centers.
Western Belize Pottery and Obsidian Geochemical Sourcing
We are conducting several ongoing studies focused on geochemical sourcing of ceramics using INAA and obsidian using pXRF to reconstruct the local and long-distance economic system in western Belize. Preliminary results suggest overlapping and contrasting procurement strategies for these key resources resources. Long-distance exchange of ceramics with polities in the Petén, Guatemala, in particular, may have underwritten the development of stratified institutional economies during the Formative period. You can read more about our ceramic INAA research here.
Mesoamerican Radiocarbon Database (MesoRAD)
The Mesoamerican Radiocarbon Database (MesoRAD.com), a collaboration with Julie Hoggarth (Baylor U), compiles radiocarbon dates and isotopic data from archaeological sites in across Mesoamerica. The inaugural dataset is now online and includes Archaic to Colonial Periods dates from the Maya lowlands, allowing researchers to explore the spatial, temporal, and contextual trends from the published literature from over six decades of archaeological research. While our current efforts are concentrating on the published 14C data, our goal is to promote the collaborative engagement of Mesoamerican archaeologists to expand the database to include more dates as well as stable isotopic information to develop larger, synthetic research projects.
