My research interests include gender, race, ethnicity, nationalism, the archaeology and socio-cultural anthropology of China, Mesoamerica, and West Africa; the African and Chinese diasporas; Afro-Atlantic religions (such as Haitian Vodoun and Santeria/Lukumi), the archaeology of social complexity; and cultural heritage issues. I am also developing a research project that examines cultural and racial hybridity in Hawai`i.
Archaeology
My research interests in archaeology are generally centered around the issue of the nature and development of social hierarchies in ancient communities. I am also interested in the role of material culture in constructing and maintaining social status. My geographical foci are Mesoamerica, China, and Polynesia.
PA-VIRU
I am currently working with Proyecto Arqueológico de Valle Inferiór del Rio Ulua (PA-VIRU) directed by John Henderson (Cornell) and Rosemary Joyce (UC Berkeley) on materials excavated from the Early Formative site of Puerto Escondido, Department of Cortés, Honduras. My part of the project involves the petrographic analysis of ceramic materials and comparison of the minerals and rock fragments in the ceramics with local geological materials. This project is designed to demonstrate the local origins of sophisticated decorated ceramics, some of which possess decorative iconography usually associated with the Gulf Coast Olmec culture.
The Roots of Bronze Age China (book project)
This general readership book discusses the origins of complex society in China and the regional Neolithic cultures that developed into the Bronze Age kingdoms of the Central Plains and their neighbors.
The significance of ancient sites in contemporary societies
This project looks at the way modern groups utilize and understand archaeological sites and the past in general. It draws together notions of landscape, power, authenticity and connection to examine the differing ways in which the past is valorized or silenced by competing ideas about the nature of “antiquity.”
Socio-cultural Anthropology
My research interests in socio-cultural anthropology revolve around the issue of identity and politics. In particular I am interested in the ways in which race, class, gender, and ethnicity are intertwined.
Ideology in settler societies
This project examines the ways in which settler societies represent themselves in historical and mythic ways. In particular, I wish to investigate the roles that the categories of race/ethnicity, class and gender become tropes for justifying and maintaining systems of colonial privilege.
Cultural and racial hybridity
This project examines the ways in which individuals who self-identify as racial and/or cultural “hybrids” that is people whose genetic and/or cultural heritages are experienced as somehow fundamentally “mixed” understand questions of identity, affiliation, belonging, and long-range survival. I will be collaborating with colleagues in a number of other disciplines to produce a book which will build upon a collection of essays written by “mixed” people.