Area of Interest:

Complexity, European societies, Hallstatt Iron Age, history & memory, ideology, identity, landscape archaeology, language & archaeology, political archaeology, post-processual archaeology, power, practice, scale

Research & Activities:

Entered the program in 2001.

Education: BS Anthropology, Mercyhurst College, Erie, PA 1998.

Research Interests: My research focuses on the early Iron Age (ca. 800/750-450 BCE) in Temperate Europe. Specifically, I study the Hallstatt, a cultural tradition that extends from western France to Slovakia and Romania in the east, southward into Croatia. My research looks at archaeological variation across the European continent during this period and attempts to separate what might be called "authentic" variation from that produced by competing national and regional archaeological schools and agendas. At the heart of this research is the dialectical relationship between the past and the present: it takes a critical look at the situation of archaeological science within international structures of ideological, socio-political, economic, and linguistic power in order to understand how our understandings of practice in the distant past might be shaped by practice in the recent past and present.

Keywords: complexity; European societies; Hallstatt Iron Age; history and
memory; identity; ideology; landscape archaeology; language and archaeology; the past in the present; political archaeology; post-processual archaeology; power; practice; scale