Biography
My research focuses on human-environmental dynamics and archaeological histories of maritime/coastal hunter-gatherers especially in the North Pacific. This research addresses questions of human vulnerability and resilience in remote subarctic environments. My ongoing work involves community-based collaborations on Kodiak, Alaska with the goal of combining archaeology, paleoecology, ethnohistory and oral history/storytelling to bridge deep histories of resilient fisheries stewardship and colonial disenfranchisement to contemporary cultural revitalization and future food security and sovereignty through research and youth education. I collaborate widely with scholars across a range of disciplines in atmospheric, Earth and biological sciences and take an historical ecological perspective on human adjustments to (and of) environments in which they live. Much of my research involves international collaborations to explore the ecological and archaeological histories of the North Pacific Rim. Since 2014 I have coordinating a comparative marine ecological working group called Paleoecology of Subarctic Seas (PESAS), which brings together paleoclimate, paleoecology, archaeology and history to investigate similarities and differences in the human-environmental co-evolution the subarctic North Pacific and North Atlantic since the Last Glacial Maximum. Since 2018 I have served on the Governing Board of the Oceans Past Initiative, a consortium of archaeologists, historians, paleoecologists and other with interest histories of human engagement with marine life and oceans.