I am interested in understanding the factors that influence resource acquisition and distribution in small-scale societies.  My research and teaching focus on hunter-gatherer ecology, ethnoarchaeology and questions about subsistence strategies across the human experience.  In my ethnographic work I use models from behavioral ecology to analyze gender and age-linked variability in foraging and food sharing practices among indigenous Australians.  My goal is to evaluate relationships between foraging, provisioning and political strategies, and their implications for understanding variability in human family organization, land use, resource conservation, waste and habitat structure.  As an ethnoarchaeologist, I study the dynamic relationship between modern foraging practices and the patterns they express in the material record.  The material results I’m interested in include the archaeological traces of large-scale habitat modification, patch exploitation, prey choice, resource processing, transport and distribution.  These are of special importance for people interested in understanding resource exploitation throughout human prehistory and its implications for dealing with contemporary environmental dilemmas.

The majority of my research is conducted in collaboration with Martu hunter-gatherers in the Western Desert of Australia, where I spend much of my time.  This project began as the Martu were compiling their Native Title Claim (finally won in 2002) and focuses on contemporary foraging and land management practices in the remote Martu communities of Parnngurr, Punmu, and Kunawarritji.  My collaborators on this project are Asst. Prof. Rebecca Bliege Bird and PhD students Brian Codding and Sarah Robinson, all at Stanford; Prof. Eric Smith at U. Washington; Asst. Prof. Brooke Scelza at UCLA; and PhD student Chris Parker at U. Utah.  I am also currently involved in two other projects.  The first focuses on the economic utility of traditionally important geophytes (roots, tubers, corms) in the American West.  This project is directed by Prof. James O’Connell and PhD student Josh Trammell, both at U. Utah.  The second is a study of the ecological effects and determinants of reef resource use on Tabuaeran atoll, Kiribati, Micronesia.  The project is directed by Fio Micheli, Rob Dunbar, Bill Durham and Doug McCauley at Stanford University.