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 2025.
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, Washington State University, and the University of Arkansas.
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. This working group aims to bring together research into goosefoot across North America, looking to explore 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.