Bio

I am an archaeologist investigating the emergence of interconnected urban societies in eastern Africa and across the Indian Ocean, drawing on perspectives in historical ecology and landscape archaeology. I have extensive experience organizing and directing archaeological research projects, successfully integrating traditional survey and excavation techniques with advanced geospatial technologies, community-based research design, and training and mentoring for early career scholars from underrepresented and underserved backgrounds.

I am currently a Visiting Research Scholar at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at NYU. I was previously a National Science Foundation SBE postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies (CAST) at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. I received my PhD from the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley in 2022. My research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Analyzing ceramics with students and members of the Zanzibar Department of Museums and Antiquities, summer 2023.

Why Africa?

Why practice archaeology in Africa? As an anthropological archaeologist, I am motivated by big questions: What processes led humans to start drastically modifying their environments through intensified food production? Why did people start living in large, specialized urban societies? Finally, how did people in the past exchange goods and ideas over vast distances, creating early globalized societies, and what types of environmental and climatic conditions impacted these changes? These complex activities are recent and emergent human experiments, the long-term outcomes of which are yet unclear. Likely, they will have drastic implications for the course of our species and planet, so it is vital to understand their timing, nature, and impacts for the present and future.

What African archaeology demonstrates is that processes leading to environmental change, food production, connectivity, and urbanism developed along unique and diverse pathways on the continent, in ways that continually force us to rethink global anthropological understandings of these trajectories. For instance, in East Africa, urban mercantile societies coexisted alongside hunter-gatherer, pastoralist, and intensified agriculturalist foodways for many centuries, and class stratification occurred in the absence of any overarching territorial state. Concurrently, societies in West Africa settled in large, urban communities that did not exhibit the monumentality and hierarchical structures associated with stratified societies elsewhere. In southern Africa, elites accumulated and mobilized social wealth in ways that lead us to rethink assumptions about the relationship between control over land, surplus, and social inequality. In short, African archaeology forces us to explain rather than assume processes as they occurred elsewhere in Europe, Asia, and the Americas.

Africa has enormous global significance but it is vastly understudied, and therefore misunderstood. Investigating anthropological questions in Africa also means countering outdated assumptions about the region, like the notion that African societies were historically static, or dominated by environmental factors. These ideas could not be further from the truth, and archaeology is uniquely suited to reveal the dynamic societies of the African past, and help to address challenges of the African and global present.

Swahili tomb, Kunduchi, Tanzania.

Research Agenda

My research spans the last 2000 years of East African history, from the earliest migrations of pastoralists, foragers, and agriculturalists to the coast and offshore islands to the emergence of socially stratified, urban mercantile societies and the initiation of colonial rule. I investigate the agency of small-scale, non-elite, and rural societies in shaping transformations at the scale of landscapes, regions, and global socioecological systems, and draw on the insights of archaeological data in the longue durée to inform contemporary approaches to Anthropocene challenges like climate change.

This long-term approach bridges disciplinary siloes of prehistory-history or precolonial-colonial periodization which artificially limit our understandings of social processes. Methodologically, my engagement is with geospatial technologies for archaeology. I use GNSS mapping, UAVs, multispectral satellite imagery, historical maps, and spatial statistics to model environments and to help understand human settlement trends across large regions. In my work I seek to develop free and open-access methods for geospatial and archaeological research, enabling broader participation in archaeological science for places without the funding or licensing agreements to obtain cutting-edge geospatial hardware and software. In particular, I have translated GIS workflows from ArcGIS to QGIS and worked with freely available satellite imagery, like PlanetScope.

I am committed to collaborative engagements with local communities and stakeholders, public outreach, and decolonial approaches to archaeological practice. In Zanzibar, this has meant practicing archaeology in the Swahili language, holding community meetings during and after field surveys, disseminating archaeological reports in Swahili to local communities, and training Tanzanian archaeologists. I have developing collaborations with the Department of Museums and Antiquities in Zanzibar, and the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Management at the University of Dar es Salaam.

Mangroves and the sea, Fuoni, Zanzibar