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Anthropology

Prior to arriving at UConn, I taught a regular course in geoarchaeology at the University of Alaska and helped supervise a cadre of graduate students digging sites. After serving as Chair of the Division of Archaeological Geology for the Geological Society of America in 1987, my research commitment to this discipline shifted from an emphasis on prehistoric Arctic archaelogy to New England historic archaeology.

Link to Five Sample Publications

Three projects are in the works:

  • With co-authors Daniel Forrest and Brian Jones, we have submitted long article invited for a Geological Society of America special paper on the alluvial stratigraphy of the Connecticut River Alluvial Lowland. The paper is presently in review.
  • I have developed a taxonomy broad enough to classify all stone walls and related phenomenon in New England, a work that has been in progress for nearly ten years and is close to completion.  It is now available online at http://www.stonewall.uconn.edu/Classification.htm  . 
  • I am converting enormous historic map of the pattern of stone walls in Harvard  Forest (and adjacent Petersham, MA) into a GIS ARCINFO system and perform a spatial analysis on the field pattern.  This, I believe is the most coherent and meaningful data set available for the phenomenon, about which I have already published a sample probability assessment.

Owing to other comitments for my teaching load, I do not teach any regular courses for the archaeology program. Rater, I serve on graduate committees, and provide graduate- and undergraduate-level seminars in archaeological geology. 

PHOTO BANNER: False color infared aerial photo of the Malaspina Glacier on the Alaskan coastal plain, a good surrogate for lobes of the Laurentide Ice Sheet (credit NASA). Pedestrian pathways cross-cut campus on ground that is unusually level for southern New England, in this case because campus sits above an uplifted Neogene erosion surface. Pleistocene archaeological site being excavated near Delta, Alaska in my favorite material, loess, windblown glacial dust. Close-up of quarried granite from a building in New London, CT contains biotite, quartz and pink orthoclase (every geology professor needs at least one photo of a rock on their website).