Hello, and welcome to my web site. I am an archaeologist based in the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford, where my postdoctoral research is funded by the British Academy’s Centenary Research Project. This project, formally titled ‘Lucy to Language: the Archaeology of the Social Brain’, is an interdisciplinary collaboration between PhD students, postdoctoral researchers, and fellows at five UK universities. In October of 2009 I was elected to a Junior Golding Fellowship at Brasenose College, Oxford.

My academic interests revolve around the palaeoanthropological and archaeological evidence of human evolution; specifically, my research applies models from theoretical and population ecology to the archaeological record via empirical analyses and simulation modeling. My Ph.D. combined spatial and allometric analyses to predict the group sizes, home range areas and land use patterns of extinct hominins, as well as modern human and non-human primate groups. Further to this, my interests focus more generally on the application of evolutionary, quantitative and computational methodologies to archaeological data. This has led to the development of a broad approach to the geometry of hunter-gatherer mobility based on archaeologically calibrated agent-based and statistical modeling of foraging activities and their likely archaeological residues in a spatial context. This approach will be reflected in papers at three international conferences in the Spring of 2008 and forms the basis of my current postdoctoral research.

My ongoing research interests include:

1. 1)The development of fully data-driven approaches to spatial analysis in archaeology, including the reconstruction of generic and specific aspects of hunter-gatherer mobility strategies;
   

2. 2)Mathematical and agent-based modelling of foraging decisions in hunter-gatherer groups as they relate to group size, technological efficiency, and the scale of annual movement;
   

3. 3)(With Dr. Fiona Coward) the neurological mechanisms facilitating the socially mediated production of material culture in hominin groups. A link to our recent Cambridge Archaeological Journal article is provided here.
   

On the following pages you can see a brief curriculum vitae as well as series of abstracts to posters, papers and publications completed over the past three years. I have also provided specific examples of the spatial analytic techniques developed in my thesis.

Hits since 4/5/2008: