Research

I am investigating how early Middle Stone Age people heat treated silcrete at Pinnacle Point in South Africa across ~100,000 years. Pinnacle Point preserves the earliest evidence for heat treatment technology at ~162,000 years ago and has some of the highest frequencies of silcrete use in South Africa around 70,000 years ago. 

My research focuses not only on determining whether a silcrete artifact was heat-treated, but also how it was heat-treated. I contextualize this with high-resolution paleoclimatic and paleoenvironmental records, and technological features of the lithic assemblage to better understand why heat treated silcrete was utilized.

I utilize experimental archaeology to build proxies for better interpreting the archaeological record. My experimental work is dominated by flintknapping and heat treatment, but also includes studies involving stone tool function, ostrich egg shell function, knapping skill, and post-depositional thermal alteration.

These experimental projects are often used for building novel methods that are quantitative, non-destructive, and probabilistic. This reduces inter-observer error and reduces the reliance on expert knowledge when interpreting the archaeological record.

My heat treatment research led me to realize the importance of understanding the geochemistry, mineralogy, and mechanics of stone raw material when interpreting the impact of heat treatment. I have recently formed collaborations investigating:

1) Inter-source and intra-source variation in silcrete geochemistry and mineralogy.

2) Variation in the mechanical properties of silcrete across heating methods.

3) Silcrete provenance using non-destructive approaches.

4) Impacts of thermal alteration on basalt, quartzite, and chert.

I am interested in how theoretical perspectives inform archaeological thinking and research questions. In particular, I think that the extended evolutionary synthesis provides a unique framework for understandign hominin evolution. 

I have organized two sessions surrounding this topic at the Society for American Archaeology meetings and the American Association of Biological Anthropologists meetings to promote discussion with experts in a variety of fields. This included ethnoarchaeologists, paleoanthropologists, North American archaeologists, human osteologists, and more.

These two sessions have resulted in special issues in Evolutionary Anthropology and PaleoAnthropology, respectively. 

If you are interested and do not have access to these papers, please don't hesitate to email me.