The short version
I'm a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard, where I study the archaeology of Central and Inner Asia. My work centers on the Eneolithic (Copper Age) and its transition into the Bronze Age, a period and place when the earliest pastoral societies began reshaping the land of what is now Kazakhstan, forging new relationships between humans, animals, and the landscapes they moved through.
I use biomolecular methods like stable isotope analysis and proteomics to figure out what ancient people and their animals were eating, where they were moving, and how their lives changed over time. I'm also interested in applying spatial methods like GIS and remote sensing to find new sites and understand how people used their landscapes. All of this is rooted in, and in conversation with, on-the-ground fieldwork.
After college, I thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail—probably the single most influential experience in shaping how I think about movement, landscape, and what it actually feels like to live a life organized around getting from one place to another. A lot of my research interests trace back to that in one way or another.
I completed my MPhil in Archaeological Science at Cambridge, where my dissertation used stable isotope analysis to reconstruct Bronze and Iron Age subsistence economies in the Tarbagatai Mountains. Before that, I studied Archaeological Studies and Anthropology at Yale. I've done fieldwork in Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Malawi, Peru, Ireland, Spain, and the U.S.—twelve years, seven countries, five continents.
Outside of archaeology, I'm an avid outdoorsman, homebrewer, reader, gamer, and occasional musician—I sang in an a cappella group at Yale for all four years, and you can find the album I'm on here. My graduate study is supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.
Advisors: Dr. Rowan Flad & Dr. Christina Warinner
