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.
| 2026 |
The impact of subsistence change on demography: Theory-informed Approximate Bayesian Computation reveals 4-fold increase in carrying capacity following economic intensification
Journal of Archaeological Science 189: 106523 (2026)
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A reconstruction of the Indigenous maize farming niche of Utah
Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 69: 105493 (2026)
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Migration and environmental learning in interstitial areas: An example from the Northern Rio Puerco Valley, New Mexico
Open Archaeology 12 (1) (2026)
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| 2025 |
Modeling the rise and demise of Classic Maya cities: Climate, conflict, and economies of scale
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 122 (42): e2512325122 (2025)
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Targeted explorations of Pleistocene-Holocene transition archaeology on the Colorado Plateau in southern Utah
Quaternary International 746: 109992 (2025)
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Drought, Population Pressure, and Inequality Drive Intergroup Conflict in the Precontact North American Southwest
American Antiquity: 1-19 (2025)
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Environmental drivers of wealth inequality among Ancestral Puebloan farmers in Bears Ears National Monument
American Antiquity: 1-7 (2025)
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| 2024 |
A method for defining dispersed community territories
Journal of Archaeological Science 170: 106048 (2024)
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Trade-off between market and ecosystem services drives settlement decisions among smallholder ranchers in Baja California Sur, Mexico
Sustainability Science 19 (4): 1377-1390 (2024)
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The Goldilocks Zone for maize agriculture and the settlement and abandonment of the West Tavaputs Plateau
Quaternary International 689-690: 30-42 (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 America
Quaternary International 689-690: 5-15 (2024)
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The Fremont frontier: Living at the margins of maize farming
American Antiquity 89 (3): 440-458 (2024)
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| 2022 |
Ecological constraints on violence avoidance tactics in the Prehispanic Central Andes
Environmental Archaeology: 1-14 (2022)
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Socioecological dynamics structuring the spread of farming in the North American basin-plateau region
Environmental Archaeology 27 (4): 434-446 (2022)
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Decomposing habitat suitability across the forager to farmer transition
Environmental Archaeology 27 (4): 420-433 (2022)
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Subsistence strategy mediates ecological drivers of human violence
PLOS ONE 17 (5): e0268257 (2022)
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Climate change–induced population pressure drives high rates of lethal violence in the Prehispanic central Andes
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119 (17): e2117556119 (2022)
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Plant species richness at archaeological sites suggests ecological legacy of Indigenous subsistence on the Colorado Plateau
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118 (21): e2025047118 (2021)
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Marriage dynamics in old Lower California: Ecological constraints and reproductive value in an arid peninsular frontier
Biodemography and Social Biology 65 (2): 156-171 (2020)
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| 2020 |
Advancing predictive modeling in archaeology: An evaluation of regression and machine learning methods on the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument
PLOS ONE 15 (10): e0239424 (2020)
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| 2017 |
The ecology of population dispersal: Modeling alternative Basin-Plateau foraging strategies to explain the Numic expansion
American Journal of Human Biology 29 (4): e23000 (2017)
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| 2025 |
Working with REST APIs to access spatial data
Spatial Utah Data Science (SUDS) Meeting, Salt Lake City, UT.
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Promoting water-use efficiency with responsible AI
One-U Responsible AI Annual Symposium, Salt Lake City, UT.
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Indirect dating with Mixture Density Networks
Utah Center for Data Science, Data Science & AI Lecture Series, Salt Lake City, UT.
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Indirect dating with Mixture Density Networks
90th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Denver, CO.
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| 2024 |
The network ecology of settlement persistence
workshop 'Advances in modelling past human ecosystems', Cologne, Germany.
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The socio-ecology of community centers
89th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, New Orleans, LA.
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The network ecology of settlement persistence
30th Annual Meeting of the European Archaeological Association, Rome, Italy.
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| 2023 |
Exploring the dynamics of late precontact obsidian procurement and exchange networks across the US Southwest and Northwest Mexico using cyberSW
The Southwest Symposium Archaeological Conference, Santa Fe, NM.
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A core-periphery approach to defining community boundaries
29th Annual Meeting of the European Archaeological Association, Belfast, Northern Ireland.
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How do I work this? this R project
Spatial Utah Data Science (SUDS) Meeting, Salt Lake City, UT.
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The ecology of agglomeration and the rise of Chaco Great Houses
88th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Portland, OR.
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| 2022 |
The Fremont frontier: Living at the margins of maize farming
87th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Chicago, IL.
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| 2021 |
Explaining PaleoIndian settlement in the Intermountain West: A regression adjustment approach
86th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, San Francisco, CA.
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| 2019 |
Decomposing habitat suitability with theory-driven machine-learning
84th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Albuquerque, NM.
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| 2018 |
Prearchaic land use in Grass Valley, Nevada: This time with Bayes
Bi-annual Great Basin Anthropological Conference, Salt Lake City, UT.
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Prearchaic land use in Grass Valley, Nevada: A novel statistical implementation of optimal distribution modeling
83th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Washington D.C..
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| 2015 |
Numic fires: Modeling the effects of anthropogenic fire on foraging decisions in the Great Basin
80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, San Francisco, CA.
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TerraCal: A global deep foundation radiocarbon calibration curve
(in prep)
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Some Kantian and Aristotelian themes in anthropological thought
(in prep)
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An encoder-decoder neural network for down-scaling soil moisture estimates
(in prep)
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Urbanism, population decline, and biodiversity in an arid environment
(in prep)
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RagStone: A retrieval-augmented language model for archaeological reports
(in prep)
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One theory, many models of habitat suitability
(in prep)
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Predicting PHT archaeology on the northwest Colorado Plateau: A predictive model for determining targeted survey areas
Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports (in prep)
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NetC14: A Gaussian mixture neural network for calibrating and summarizing radiocarbon dates
Journal of Archaeological Science (in prep)
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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
(in prep)
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The evolution of a labor market
(in prep)
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Responsible artificial intelligence and the science of human-environment interactions
Environmental Data Science (in prep)
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Explaining PaleoIndian settlement in the Intermountain West
American Antiquity (in prep)
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