My  present research focuses on interpreting social stratification from African archaeological and living contexts. However, before working in Africa, I  worked in the American Southwest studying the development of prehistoric agriculture (Early Pithouse Villages of the Mimbres Valley and Beyond, edited by Michael W. Diehl and Steven A. LeBlanc, Peabody Museum, Harvard University). Beginning with my acceptance as a Ph.D. student at the University of Florida, I changed my research to the Horn of Africa. Here, my Ph.D. research was funded by a National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement grant, allowing me to look at social and economic differences based on household ceramic assemblages. I used of the life cycle approach (i.e., procurement to discard), to view the many contexts that ceramics can undergo in a complex stratified society, revealed that household ceramics are an excellent indicator of household social stratification. This research is the focus of a new book published in 2006 by the University of Utah Press Foundations of Archaeological Inquiry Series and is titled, Living with Pottery: Ethnoarchaeology among the Gamo of southwest Ethiopia.  My studies in Ethiopia also indicated that beer production is visible in the form of residues on archaeological ceramics, and as a consequence beer producing elite households can be distinguished from non-beer producing commoner households, (Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 2002 and World Archaeology 2003). In addition to my research in Ethiopia, I have collaboratively written with Kathryn Weedman Arthur about the methodological importance of ethnoarchaeology, which is the study of present-day material culture to help interpret the archaeological past (Handbook of Archaeological Methods 2005).

University of South Florida St. Petersburg students excavating Gamo sites.