Auburn University

Faculty Member, Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work

College of Liberal Arts

About

My research explores the biological consequences of social inequalities and political economy through data derived from archaeological contexts in the Caribbean and Southeastern United States.

I earned a Ph.D. in biological anthropology from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale in 2005 and joined the anthropology faculty at Auburn University in 2007 where I teach a courses in bioarchaeology, medical anthropology, human variation, human evolution, and anthropological methods and theory.

My Ph.D. project assessed skeletal correlates of health, nutrition, and quality of life for 17th-19th century enslaved Africans from the Newton Plantation cemetery in Barbados, West Indies.  Wide-spread systemic stress was identified for all ages and both sexes, with especially high rates of generalized infections of lower bodies and high markers of work-related stress. Both the paleopathology and paleodemography, which confirm high mortality and low fertility at this site, support the extremely brutal conditions of slave life on Caribbean sugar plantations and provide supplementary, and potentially more direct, evidence of health in concert with archival documents written by planters and manifests from slaving vessels.

Since joining the faculty at Auburn, I have been awarded grants to compile health, mortuary, and stable isotope data that have been collected from Newton Plantation cemetery between 1971 and 2011.  These collaborative data are being used to address unanswered questions about intrasite variability, which will contribute to an expanding discourse on local and global political economy of sugar, slavery, and health. 

Complementing this Caribbean bioarchaeological research, I have examined the skeletal health and social statuses of 16th century Maya children from Tipu, Belize and currently lead a collaborative project to investigate the utility of musculoskeletal stress markers as a tool for reconstructing occupational stress, shifting labor roles, and the emergence of sociopolitical hierarchies among small, late prehistoric (ca. AD 600-1500) communities of the Tombigbee River valley and the large ceremonial center at Moundville, Alabama.  I have published on the dental health of the Tombigbee series in Mississippi Archaeology and currently have several manuscripts in press and under review.

Contact Information