I am an ecological anthropologist whose research explores the social and environmental dynamics of farming and foraging societies, past and present. My research has spanned several of the traditional subdisciplines, including sociocultural anthropology, archaeology, and linguistics. Overall, my work is guided by anthropology’s traditional focus on human cultural and biological variability, which I believe can provide important insights into pressing questions about contemporary societies and environmental sustainability and resilience. My work engages with theory and methods from complex adaptive systems, which involves computational modeling and statistics to explore the ways that coupled human and natural systems evolve and interact with culturally-mediated human behavior.  

Currently, my main project involves investigating the integrated social and ecological dynamics of swidden agriculture. Swidden is the earliest form of agriculture practiced by humans for 10k years, and which continues to be an essential livelihood for up to 500m Indigenous and small-holder societies worldwide. This research is supported by an NSF CAREER grant, which focuses on integrating student training and cutting-edge research. In my work this takes two forms: fieldwork in Belize, Central American, and computational analysis in the Human Complexity Lab.  

As a member of the HEALMOD core faculty, I am working with collaborators to analyze data that I have collected during fieldwork in several Maya communities in southern Belize since I began fieldwork there in 2005. We are actively engaged in developing bespoke models that shed light on ways that small-scale societies can increase the productivity and resilience of their local environments through social norms.  

Current Graduate Students:

Shane Scaggs 

Jensan Allred