University of Colorado Denver

Faculty Member, Anthropology

Associate Professor

College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

About

My research has since graduate school revolved around issues in ancient political organization and scales of social identity (individual agency, corporate group, and ethnic identity). The sociopolitical system of the Tequila valleys, Jalisco, from ca. 1000 BC to AD 500 provides a distinctive case study in which power was shared between multiple lineages, subverting both individual identity and hierarchical power structures based on a single royal lineage. I have pursued this research through excavation at the settlements of Navajas and Llano Grande, study of the depiction of rulership in contemporary artwork, and computer simulation in collaboration with Dr. William Baden of Indiana-Purdue Fort Wayne. I will soon begin a large scale survey project in collaboration with Dr. Verenice Heredia of the Colegio de Michoacan that elaborates upon this research to evaluate the rise and demise of this political system.

A second research thread has been the integration of linguistic, biological, ethnohistoric, and archaeological evidence to investigate the introduction of Nahuatl speaking migrants into parts of highland Mesoamerica in the 6th century AD. A regional scale analysis identified a good degree of overlap between biology and the use of material culture, but a detailed site-specific study at Tula identified a much more complex situation in which migrants and the indigenous population used material culture to signal claims about identity and affiliation. A study in preparation attempts a similar (though less detailed) complement to the Mezquital case in central Jalisco. Much of this research has been in collaboration with Dr. Alec Christensen of JPAC-CILHI.

Many of the publications from my CV are available here, but I also have most of them in electronic format if you want to email me for a copy. I have not yet posted papers presented in conferences.

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