College of Arts and Sciences

I am an archaeologist at the University of Louisville. My research interests include prehistoric land-use and human decision-making. I am theoretically inclined towards an evolutionary approach to culture change by studying the historical trajectory of human action within an ecological context at the regional scale.

I have been doing archaeological fieldwork in Portugal since 1993. Most of my research focuses on human lifeways during the Upper Paleolithic (35,000-10,000 years ago). Currently, I am preparing a NSF-funded project titled, Late Pleistocene Coastal Settlement of Central Portugal. This project is an archaeological survey of the coastal region between the town of Nazaré and the Serra de Candeeiros, about 100 km north of Lisbon. The immediate goal of this project is to find evidence of coastal settlement during the last ice age. During this period global sea level was much lower because enormous amounts of water was trapped in frozen continental ice sheets. Lowered sea level created a 10-40 km strip of exposed land along the central Portuguese coast. Most of this has been lost due to postglacial sea level rise. However, in places where the continental shelf is steep, the distances to ancient shorelines is much shorter. Therefore, it is possible to find near-coastal Paleolithic settlements on modern land surfaces. The Nazaré region is such a location and also contains the types of geological contexts in which Paleolithic sites are found in Portugal.

The project is open to undergraduate participation. You should contact me to discuss research opportunites.

Additional opportunities for excavation are also possible:

Together with Nuno Bicho, Universidade do Algarve, I excavated a cave site called Lapa do Picareiro. This site contains numerous occupation levels dated to the Late Upper Paleolithic. In the course of the last season at Picareiro, we encountered several deeper levels that likely date to Neandertal times.

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