Anthropologist
Appalacian raised scion of an old, Scotch-Irish colonial family of Kentucky (father) and Pennsylvania Dutch(mother) pioneers. Four of my ancestors were Revolutionary War veterans. My wife is from the island of Mindanao.
Growing up, my fathers occupation was timber-frame carpentry, real estate, ski resort management and hobby farming; my mother continues to teach in a small religious academy.
BA Communications 1990 Penn State (film, writing, text analysis, and production)
MA Anthropology 2004 SUNY University at Albany
Archaeology and research in ten states, Iceland, Ireland
Curretly: Doctoral program UAlbany focusing on sub arctic community archaeology in the North Atlantic.
Interests:
Circumpolar Subarctic archaeology and ethnology with an emphasis on island environments, particularly the North Atlantic during the Viking expansion, the Aluetians, Hokkaido/Sakhalin/Kurils, and a and similar interest in the European Paleolithic and, in contrast, the South Pacific. I utilize the approaches of Symbolic Interactionism Symbolic Ecology, Historical Ecology, Complexity/Chaos theory, Contingency and Dual Inheritance theory to study community and settlement pattern in mixed subsistence systems. I research how the symbolically encoded, culturally defined perception of the environment influences survival related activities, crafts, vernacular architecture and praxis, and how people form social organizations, communities, hierarchies and heterarchies. Ultimately, I work toward understanding how various cultural practices result in long term success or failure, and how they effect quality of life, thereby applying those lesson to life and community development. I am currently engaged in a comparative study of Greenlandic Norse and Inuit sheep herding ecology.
Related interests include: Material Culture and its recursive psychological effects. Household Archaeology and Folk Technology. Small Community, sense of community, and Evolutionary adaptation. Prehistoric technology and landscape use – particularly of rangifer hunting societies. Neolithic to Viking Age technology and landscape use – particularly of North Atlantic islands. Small farms/circumpolar mixed hunting/sheep farming economies. Philippine, Polynesian, and Mayan Ethnography. Contact and Viking Period living history Horses Hunting and Fishing Archery Cooking and Family