Summary:

I’m a Former Fulbright Fellow and recovering social anthropologist with a decade of experience scribbling about cultural heritage in mainland Southeast Asia. Following the pandemic, I took up a daring second life as a junior researcher in Eurasian prehistory. In 2024 I earned a Master's degree in Archaeological Sciences and Human Evolution from the University of Tübingen with a specialization in Stone Age Archaeology. My Master’s thesis investigated Upper Paleolithic personal ornaments from Southwestern France and the Swabian Jura (Southwest Germany), utilizing morphometric faunal analysis, 3D modelling, experimental archaeology and traceological microscopy to reconstruct 40,000-14,000 year old transregional exchange dynamics among the earliest groups of anatomically modern humans in Europe.

I’m now pursuing a PhD in Zooarchaeology & Traceological Analysis under the German Research Foundation (DFG) funded project "From Ornaments to Ecosystems: Exploring Hominin-Mammoth Interactions in the Late Pleistocene of the Swabian Jura (Southern Germany)” at the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Paleoenvironment (SHEP) in Tübingen. The project tracks ecological and cultural feedback loops from the late Middle Palaeolithic through the Gravettian (ca. 60,000 to 30,000 cal BP) in the Meuse, Rhine and Danube corridors using stable isotopes (C, N, Sr, S), ZooMS, morphological zooarchaeology, and traceological analysis. My role is to reconstruct the chaîne-opératoire of various osseous artifacts produced on mammoth byproducts to answer questions about cultural identity, social organization, territoriality and exchange in the European Middle to Upper Paleolithic.

Research Interests:

I’m fascinated by processes of ethnogenisis (cultural group and identity formation). I’m especially interested in seeing how cultural technologies—things like constructed regional group identities, seasonally shifting social structures, and dynamic mobility and exchange networks—served as environmental adaptations in the late Pleistocene. I use tangible archaeological proxies (e.g. personal ornaments; lithic/osseous reduction sequences; variable faunal selection & transport strategies; etc.) to track developments and shifts in these cultural abstractions, and with the help of fancy multivariate statistics—and occasionally some highfalutin semiotic theory—try to see how they may have varied both diachronically as well as between contemporaneous human communities.

TLDR: Cultural Identity; Social Organization; Mobility; Territoriality; Exchange; Personal Ornaments; Environmental Adaptation

Methods:

Experimental Use-wear & Traceology; Morphological & Morphometric Zooarchaeology; ZooMS; Stable Isotopes; 3D Modelling & 3D Geometric Morphometrics; Element Network Analysis 
 

Education:

MSc. Archaeological Sciences & Human Evolution, 2022-2024
Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany
Thesis: UP Network & Identity Tracking with Red Deer (Cervus elaphus) Maxillary Canine Ornaments

BA. (Hons.) Sociology & Cultural Anthropology, 2011-2015 
Lewis & Clark College, Portland, OR, USA 
Thesis: The Online Culture of the Cryptoeconomy: A Liquid Modern Ethnography of the Deep Web

Presentations:

“Upper Paleolithic Red Deer (Cervus elaphus) Maxillary Canine Ornament Exchange Networks as Environmental Adaptation” presented at the 31st  Meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists (EAA), hosted online by the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade, Serbia (Sep 2025)

“Beyond Boundaries: Tracking Upper Paleolithic Cultural Identity & Exchange Networks with Red Deer (Cervus elaphus) Maxillary Canine Ornaments” presented at the 66th Conference of the Hugo Obermaier Society, ICArEHB – Interdisciplinary Center for Archaeology and the Evolution of Human Behaviour (Universidade do Algarve), Faro, Portugal (Apr 2025)

“Fashion trends, sewing and body modification in the Upper Paleolithic of Southwest Germany,” presented at the Archaeology and Anthropology of Body Modification International Conference, Musée de l’Homme, Paris, France (Nov 2024)

“Reconstruction of Clothing Based on the Distribution of Personal Ornaments in Palaeolithic and Mesolithic Burials,” co-presented with Dr. Marian Vanhaeren (CNRS, University of Bordeaux) at the 17th Archaeological Conference of Central Germany: A Stone Age History of Clothing, Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, Halle (Salle), Germany (Sep 2024)

“A Stag-gering Proposal: Tracking UP Identity & Exchange Networks with Red Deer (Cervus elaphus) Maxillary Canine Ornaments,” presented at the Colloquium for Early Prehistory, Hohentübingen Castle, Tübingen, Germany (July 2024)

“Perforated Cervid Tooth Ornaments for Band-Level Identity and Network Tracking in the Upper Paleolithic of the Swabian Jura,” poster presented at the 65th Conference of the Hugo Obermaier Society, Weimarhalle Congress Centrum, Weimar, Germany (Apr 2024)

“Experimental Human Footprints: Excavation & Documentation,” co-presented with Prof Dr. Chris Miller, Dr. Susan Mentzer, et al. at the ASHE Colloquium, Department of Geosciences, Tübingen, Germany (Jan 2024)