Faculty/Staff Profile Title

I am currently associate dean in the Yale Gordon College of Arts and Sciences where I have taught a variety of anthropology courses, such as Cultural Anthropology, Human Environmental Adaptations, and Historical Archaeology, in addition to some natural sciences courses, including Human Biology and Earth in Focus.

An archaeologist by training, I have spent much of my career working on Pre-Columbian cultures of Central Mexico. I have had the opportunity to excavate at 2,000-year-old sites and survey large geographic areas in search of archaeological ruins in Puebla, Mexico. As a collaborator at the National Museum of Natural History, I also conducted laboratory studies of the chemical composition of ancient Mesoamerican pottery.

In the 2000s, I began to turn my attention to issues involving the archaeology of African Americans, which led several years ago to the creation of the Laurel Cemetery Project. The cemetery, established for the African American community of Baltimore in 1852, was ultimately destroyed in the 1960s amid allegations of political corruption and is now the site of the Belair Edison Crossing Shopping Center in East Baltimore. Our excavations and remote sensing surveys identified human remains at the site which spawned a movement to construct a memorial for those interred at the burial ground.