I'm an archaeologist with wide-ranging theoretical interests that include, most basically, material culture or 'things' and social relations in the human past.   Research areas include the American Southwest, New England, Hawaii, and the Andes; my current research activity involves an exploration of heterarchy in the Andes.  Heterarchy is social organisation that involves networks and linkages that are horizontal, fluid, and often informal, rather than rigidly institutionalised in the hierarchical forms that we experience in modern Western society.   In related research, I've explored the ways that craft production in the past might be differently organised in heterarchical settings, and I've considered how art and other symbolic material culture might tell us about the experience of everyday life in heterarchical (smaller-scale) societies in the past.  

A 2016 issue of the journal World Archaeology was entitled 'The Archaeology of Coalition and Consensus' .  In a group of edited papers, archaeologists sought an understanding of the ways that people built alliances, forged consensus, and cooperated in past societies where 'top-down' leadership was weak or absent.  My recent co-authored article in Annual Reviews of Anthropology (with Tim Earle) evaluated collective action theory and related themes to widen understandings of past political economies.

Fascinated by questions of how affect and emotion shaped human interaction in the past, I have looked for ways we can recognise these dynamics in the archaeological record.  While social scientists recognise the 'power of public opinion', we need to be creative to assess these dynamics in the past.  Again, material culture (and art) offer insights if we know how to look.

More generally, my long-standing research interests involve community organization, explored through studies of architecture and the built environment.  I have investigated power and its institutional dynamics in early states (the Inka empire), and particularly the importance of ideologies in materializing power relations.  I also have broad interests in the origins of social inequality in the human past, the emergence of leadership, and 'bottom-up' patterns of social integration.  In other words, why might people give up their freedom to accept leaders, and how do people manage social relations at expanding scales of societal interaction?

I have studied 'middle-range' societies comparatively through the archaeology of the Andes, Hawaii, and the American Southwest.  My most significant fieldwork has been in the Calchaqui Valley of Salta Province, Argentina; this work is currently being written up for publication.  The archaeology of daily life and heterarchical social order is being investigated through the publication of excavations undertaken from 1998-2006 at Borgatta, a large site in Cachi Adentro, in Salta Province, in collaboration with Dr Kevin Lane of CONICET, Argentina.

I'm also currently investigating the relationships between Natives and English settlers from 1620 to the present in the town of Harwich on Cape Cod.  Here, the aim is to build our understanding of changing social and economic relationships in a setting where Natives and English settlers lived side by side for many years.