Northwest plant food systems through time - Much of our work has focused on understanding how camas (Camassia spp.), an edible bulb and staple plant food for Northwest communities, was stewarded and harvested in the past. Going forward, my collaborators and I are working on understanding three things about Northwest peoples diets in the past: expanding on how they were caring for, managing, or stewarding past camas communities and ecosystems, exploring other edible plants such as wapato, the lomatiums, or tarweed, and understanding the ways past climate regimes affected those management practices. This work prioritizes collaboration with tribal nations and state and federal agencies, with a goal of creating informed management plans for edible cultural keystone species that account for millennia of human input as well as future global warming and aridification. This work is also designed with my close collaborators at the Kalispel Tribe to contribute to their ongoing interests in food security. In the summer of 2023 we helped run a field school with the Tribe focused on Indigenous archaeology, cultural resource management, and histories of food security and sovereignty, and plan to continue this model at OSU in 2026.
Willamette Valley archaeology & stewardship – Our group also seeks to help understand pre-colonial Kalapuyan lifeways and land stewardship in the Willamette Valley through archaeological and paleoecological research. Future field schools will take place at Camp Adair where our work will aim to integrate Indigenous knowledge with scientific methods to reconstruct past lifeways, food systems, and the role of stewardship practices in shaping valley ecosystems over the past 12,000 years. Our project contributes to broader efforts in Oregon and Northwest archaeology to understand Indigenous landscape management and inform climate-resilient restoration strategies today.
Salmonidae life-history diversity & abundance - Recovery plans and goals for Pacific northwest salmon, trout, and char (Oncorhynchus spp., Salmonidae) seek to restore self-sustaining, harvestable salmon runs as part of the region’s economic, ecological, and social vitality. These plans, however, rely on relatively recent (<70 years) population and habitat estimates. To establish a pre-settlement baseline for conservation and ecocultural restoration, our interdisciplinary team is working with archaeological data from the Skagit River, WA watershed to reconstruct these pre-industrial fish runs, abundances, and genetic histories. This project is specifically pairing isotopic analyses and piloting new ancient DNA methodologies on Salmonidae vertebrae to look at life-history strategies in the past and offer data for restoration managers today. Project partners include the Burke Museum, the North Cascades National Park, Seattle City Light, the Rocky Mountain Research Station, the US Geological Survey, and Washington State University.
Digital reference collections – Collaborators within and beyond this lab group are exploring ways of digitizing ethnobotanical reference images to increase accessibility for researchers globally. The EAL continues to add pages to the Northwest Native Plants website as part of this project. We are also helping organize a Society for American Archaeology 2026 panel and are exploring funding opportunities to support this work.
Global approaches to Goosefoot – Charred goosefoot (Chenopodium sp.) seeds are often among the most common plant taxa at archaeological sites throughout western North America. Once overlooked as markers of environmental disturbance, it is only within the last decade that archaeologists in this region have begun actively exploring the ways chenopods functioned in within past socio-economies. As members of the genus have been independently domesticated and/or featured in cuisines worldwide, there is much to understand about how this plant functioned within past socioeconomies. A recent Society of Ethnobiology symposium brought together researchers exploring Chenopodium trends across space and time, phenotypic and genetic change, archaeological and experimental approaches to preparation, and chenopods as an option for contemporary food security. These papers will be published in a special edited issue of Ethnobiology Letters in 2026.