I’m a Canadian-born bioarchaeologist working primarily in Egypt and Turkey these days. I’ve also worked in Italy, England, Sudan, Mexico, Canada and the US. After years of leading a semi-nomadic existence, my wife and I have recently settled in Oxford. My doctoral research focused on the use of dental morphological traits to assess the biological affinities of a Late Roman Period skeletal population from the Dakhleh Oasis, Egypt. My other research interests include:
- Human osteology
- Paleopathology
- Forensic anthropology
- Mortuary archaeology and the anthropology of mortuary rituals
I began my studies within a traditional North American four-field anthropology department and despite subsequent years of specialization in bioarchaeology I still consider myself an anthropologist at heart. What has always motivated me is a desire to understand why we, as humans, do such strange, wonderful and sometimes terrible things. Anthropologists look at human behavior, past and present, from a cross-cultural perspective that incorporates knowledge from the social, biological and physical sciences as well as the humanities. While anthropologists have long used this approach to study non-Western cultures (and still do), this breadth of view also forces us to re-examine our own closely held beliefs, assumptions and practices, which we often assume to be the “correct” or “natural” way of doing things. Contemporary anthropologists might argue that it is impossible to ever fully understand why we “do the things we do” and perhaps they’re right. For me though, the reward lies in the attempt.
I can also be found on Google+, LinkedIn, Academia.edu and Flickr
