Research Interests

I have been doing archaeological fieldwork in Portugal since 1993.  My research interests focus on human land-use and decision-making as part of a socio-natural process to understand how past humans, especially Neanderthals and modern humans in Europe, interacted with their environment.
Currently, I am conducting an NSF-funded excavation of Lapa do Picareiro, a cave in central Portugal. The project brings together an international team to recover high-resolution archaeological, geological and paleoecological records to test whether or not differences in land use and diet allowed Neanderthals to survive in southwestern Europe longer than anywhere else. Lapa do Picareiro is a unique site, with least 10m of sediments spanning 75,000 years. The sequence includes almost 2m of deposits dated between 30-42 ka cal BP, making it an ideal locale to track changes in paleoenvironments and human ecodynamics across the Middle-Upper Paleolithic transition. In past three seasons, we excavated a newly discovered sealed off part of the cave with Magdalenian artifacts and bones scattered on the surface and a series of stratified hearths dated to the Solutrean, Proto-Solutrean, and Terminal Gravettian. We also confirmed 2 new Early Upper Paleolithic and 3 new Middle Paleolithic levels. The work will continue through at least 2019.