I am a fourth year Ph.D. student in the department of Anthropology at the University of Utah. My dissertation research includes work on analyzing paleo-ecological proxy data from a sediment core from Billy Slope Bog in Range Creek Canyon, Utah. Proxy data collected include charcoal and pollen abundance data, and stable carbon and nitrogen isotope values for bulk sediments. When finished, the datasets should provide a basis from which to test hypotheses about the human habitation of the canyon, including those dealing with when and why the canyon’s inhabitants began and abandoned maize farming, a centrally important question in Utah and greater southwestern prehistory, and to human prehistory in general.

I find the most intriguing hypotheses about human behavioral decisions to be those derived from the biological literature on behavioral ecology. These include especially the use of optimality models from foraging theory to predict prehistoric resource choice and technology. Of critical importance to using these models is the need to adequately describe the ecological settings in which choices were made. This includes describing paleo-environments and estimating the abundance of economically important food items. For this reason I have focused my attention on the paleo-environmental reconstruction techniques currently in use in paleo-biogeography such as pollen and charcoal abundance in sediment cores, etc, with an eye for human impacts on a landscape level, the signatures of which can often be recorded in such datasets.

The projects I am involved with in addition to my dissertation research are varied but revolve around the central theme of human adaptation and behavioral ecology. For the past five years (I started the project as an undergraduate) I have been monitoring the abundance of wild onions (Alliummacropetalum) in naturally occurring patches at the University of Utah Rio Mesa Center Field Station. The goal of that project is to describe the natural abundance cycles of this traditionally important edible plant, and eventually to carry out experimental patch modification to quantify human impacts such as burning, harvesting, etc. on the resource. Along this same line of research, I started a similar project in 2013 dealing with yampa (Perideridia gairdneri), another edible root, in the Deep Creek mountains on the Goshute Reservation in Juab County, Utah. In addition to monitoring yampa abundance over time at the site, I collected a sediment core from the site for paleo-ecological reconstruction. I hope with this project to be able to identify an anthropogenic fire signal associated with ethnographic use of the resource patch.

I have also recently undertaken an attempt to quantify the ways in which people in prehistory could have offset the costs of agricultural effort by taking advantage of the resulting increase in abundance of agricultural pests (rabbits, squirrels, etc.). I am exploring traditional capturing methods with an eye for the costs of technological investment including the time required to make and maintain traditional trapping equipment. Additionally, since the gains associated with targeting small mammals are heavily dependent of encounter rates, I have started to measure the increases in abundance of agricultural pests through small mammal census data in the agricultural fields and wild-lands of Range Creek Canyon, Utah.