This website collects all of my publishing output along with a list of current or ongoing projects. It is presented in a way that is easy to search, providing access to preprints (at least when I have them) and bibliographic data, all of which can be directly downloaded.
Current Position
One-U Responsible AI Postdoctoral Fellow | University of Utah
Research Interests
Broadly speaking, my research focuses on the ecology of human behavior, but here are the specific questions that really animate me these days:
- Climate adaptation and migration: in very abstract terms, how do people distribute themselves across space, and how is that influenced over the long term by climate trends?
- The economics of early, early, early urbanism: that is, how did we get from small, dispersed groups of mobile hunter-gatherers to large concentrations of sedentary city dwellers?
- Demographic interpolation: or, how do we estimate population size without a census?
In my spare time, I also contribute to several FOSS projects in the R community, especially extendr.
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2026
A reconstruction of the Indigenous maize farming niche of UtahJournal of Archaeological Science: Reports 69: 105493 (2026)10.1016/j.jasrep.2025.105493
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The impact of subsistence change on demography: Theory-informed Approximate Bayesian Computation reveals 4-fold increase in carrying capacity following economic intensificationJournal of Archaeological Science 189: 106523 (2026)10.1016/j.jas.2026.106523
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2025
Drought, Population Pressure, and Inequality Drive Intergroup Conflict in the Precontact North American SouthwestAmerican Antiquity: 1-19 (2025)10.1017/aaq.2025.10107
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Environmental drivers of wealth inequality among Ancestral Puebloan farmers in Bears Ears National MonumentAmerican Antiquity: 1-7 (2025)10.1017/aaq.2025.8
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Targeted explorations of Pleistocene-Holocene transition archaeology on the Colorado Plateau in southern UtahQuaternary International 746: 109992 (2025)10.1016/j.quaint.2025.109992
- 2024
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Can we reliably detect adaptive responses of hunter-gatherers to past climate change? Examining the impact of Mid-Holocene drought on Archaic settlement in the Basin-Plateau Region of North AmericaQuaternary International 689-690: 5-15 (2024)10.1016/j.quaint.2023.06.014
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The Goldilocks Zone for maize agriculture and the settlement and abandonment of the West Tavaputs PlateauQuaternary International 689-690: 30-42 (2024)10.1016/j.quaint.2023.12.003
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2022
Climate change–induced population pressure drives high rates of lethal violence in the Prehispanic central AndesProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119 (17): e2117556119 (2022)10.1073/pnas.2117556119
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Subsistence strategy mediates ecological drivers of human violencePLOS ONE 17 (5): e0268257 (2022)10.1371/journal.pone.0268257
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Plant species richness at archaeological sites suggests ecological legacy of Indigenous subsistence on the Colorado PlateauProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118 (21): e2025047118 (2021)10.1073/pnas.2025047118
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2020
Advancing predictive modeling in archaeology: An evaluation of regression and machine learning methods on the Grand Staircase-Escalante National MonumentPLOS ONE 15 (10): e0239424 (2020)10.1371/journal.pone.0239424
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Marriage dynamics in old Lower California: Ecological constraints and reproductive value in an arid peninsular frontierBiodemography and Social Biology 65 (2): 156-171 (2020)10.1080/19485565.2020.1728685
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2017
The ecology of population dispersal: Modeling alternative Basin-Plateau foraging strategies to explain the Numic expansionAmerican Journal of Human Biology 29 (4): e23000 (2017)10.1002/ajhb.23000
- 2026
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2025
Indirect dating with Mixture Density NetworksUtah Center for Data Science, Data Science & AI Lecture Series, Salt Lake City, UT.
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Promoting water-use efficiency with responsible AIOne-U Responsible AI Annual Symposium, Salt Lake City, UT.
- 2024
- 2023
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Exploring the dynamics of late precontact obsidian procurement and exchange networks across the US Southwest and Northwest Mexico using cyberSWThe Southwest Symposium Archaeological Conference, Santa Fe, NM.
- 2022
- 2021
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2019
Decomposing habitat suitability with theory-driven machine-learning84th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Albuquerque, NM.
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2018
Prearchaic land use in Grass Valley, Nevada: A novel statistical implementation of optimal distribution modeling83th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Washington D.C..
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Prearchaic land use in Grass Valley, Nevada: This time with BayesBi-annual Great Basin Anthropological Conference, Salt Lake City, UT.
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2015
Numic fires: Modeling the effects of anthropogenic fire on foraging decisions in the Great Basin80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, San Francisco, CA.
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NetC14: A Gaussian mixture neural network for calibrating and summarizing radiocarbon datesJournal of Archaeological Science (2-Drafting)
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Predicting PHT archaeology on the northwest Colorado Plateau: A predictive model for determining targeted survey areasJournal of Archaeological Science: Reports (2-Drafting)
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Socio-economic status before we measured it: A machine learning approach to imputing income and education in the US Census before 1950(2-Drafting)
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An encoder-decoder neural network for down-scaling soil moisture estimates(1-Planning/Development)
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One theory, many models of habitat suitability(1-Planning/Development)
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RagStone: A retrieval-augmented language model for archaeological reports(1-Planning/Development)
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Responsible artificial intelligence and the science of human-environment interactionsEnvironmental Data Science (1-Planning/Development)
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Some Kantian and Aristotelian themes in anthropological thought(1-Planning/Development)
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TerraCal: A global deep foundation radiocarbon calibration curve(1-Planning/Development)
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Urbanism, population decline, and biodiversity in an arid environment(1-Planning/Development)