Areas of Research/Interest

Archaeological and geological methods to explore the behavioral evolution of Middle and Later Pleistocene hominins and the origin of Homo sapiens.

Affiliated with other departments or programs

The Center for the Study of Human Origins

Publications

The Middle Stone Age of the northern Kenyan Rift: Age and context of new archaeological sites from the Kapedo Tuffs. Journal of Human Evolution.

Approaches for understanding flake production in the African Acheulean. In (G. Tostevin, ed.) Reduction Sequence, Chaîne Opératoire, and Other Methods: The Epistemologies of Different Approaches to Lithic Analysis. New York: Springer.

Building a tephrochronological framework for the central Anatolian Paleolithic. Poster presented at the Annual Meetings of the Paleoanthropology Society, Vancouver, Canada.

'Early’ Middle Stone Age lithic technology of the Kapthurin Formation (Kenya). Current Anthropology 47: 367-375.

Tephrostratigraphy of the Bedded Tuff Member (Kapthurin Formation, Kenya) and the nature of archaeological change in the later Middle Pleistocene. Quaternary Research 65:492-507.

From Acheulian to Middle Stone Age in the Kapthurin Formation, Kenya. In (E. Hovers & S. Kuhn, eds) Transitions before the Transition. New York: Springer, pp. 257-277.

Investigating the destructive potential of earthworms for the archaeobotanical record. Journal of Field Archaeology 31:199-202.

Le concept Levallois en Afrique. Annales Fyssen 20:132-145.

Levallois lithic technology from the Kapthurin Formation, Kenya: Acheulian origin and Middle Stone Age diversity. African Archaeological Review 22:199-229.

Bluff-top sand sheets in northeastern archaeology: A physical transport model and application to the Neville Site, Amoskeag Falls, New Hampshire. In (D.L. Cremeens & J. Hart, eds) Geoarchaeology of Landscapes in the Glaciated Northeast. Albany:NY State Museum Bulletin 497, pp.61-73.

Tephrostratigraphy and the Acheulian to Middle Stone Age transition in the Kapthurin Formation, Kenya. Journal of Human Evolution 42:211-235.

Possible sources of mylonite and hornfels debitage from the Cooper Site, Lyme, Connecticut. Bulletin of the Archaeological Society of Connecticut 60:3-12.

Current News / Projects
Updated July 2009

Survived first year.  Full stop.
Everything else pales in comparison, but the last year has been a busy and productive one.  Funded by an NSF High Risk Research in Anthropology grant, my fieldwork in January and July of 2009 focused on exploration and excavation of Middle Stone Age archaeological sites on Rusinga Island, Kenya.  Rusinga lies on the shores of Lake Victoria, and is famous for its much older (approximately 18 million-year-old)  Miocene primate fauna.  Rarely have the younger sediments (perhaps 130,000-12,000 years old), the ‘overburden,’ been studied in any detail.  The setting is beautiful and the initial results promising, and include the recovery of diverse stone tools, a rich fossil fauna including numerous well preserved rodent skulls, as well as volcanic ash deposits that will provide important data to determine the age of the discovered sites.
The use of volcanic ash deposits to date archaeological sites has continued to be a strong theme of my field and laboratory work.  I published the results of an archaeological and geological project conducted in northern Kenya in the Journal of Human Evolution last year and published a second article in the Journal of Archaeological Science in 2009, based upon ongoing research on Paleolithic sites in central Turkey.  As a co-PI, I’ve also received funding from the LSB Leakey Foundation to investigate the presence of volcanic ash deposits in Middle and Lower Paleolithic sites in France.
My other on-going long-term projects include contributing to an encyclopedia of human evolution to be published by Blackwell Scientific Press, constructing a database on human and environmental evolution with the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, and examining the use of stone tools at Olorgesailie, an important archaeological site in Kenya.  Lastly, I was appointed an Associate Editor of the Journal of Human Evolution, preceded by being named Top Reviewer 2008 for that venue.
I’ve had a busy pair of semesters in course preparation, and in some ways, this has been the most rewarding work of the year, resulting in (what I feel at least!) to have been a very successful undergraduate course in African archaeology, and, co-taught with Randall White, the graduate seminar “Archaeology of Modern Human Origins.”  I also joined my first Ph.D. committee, and was pleased to see Jim Boyle successfully defend his dissertation.