Ph.D., University of Arizona, Anthropology (Archaeology and Materials Science)

My research interest is the origins of pottery. I investigate early ceramic technologies adopting methods developed in archaeology, materials science, and geoscience. My studies reconstruct production processes, circulation, use, and post-depositional processes and assess degrees of residential mobility, patterns of exchange, and producers’ intended functions. Behavioral inferences from pottery studies are compared to the timing of changes in stone tool technology, features, and site locations. I evaluate the correspondence between behavioral and environmental variability and changes.

I obtained my Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Arizona in 2013 with a dissertation entitled “Early Pottery in the Tropics of Panama (ca. 4,500-3,200 B.P.): Production Processes, Circulation, and Diagenesis.” Monagrillo pottery of Panama is associated with the oldest dates for ceramics in Central America. Potters were sedentary farmers exchanging resources. While I have continued to research in southern Central America and northern South America on this topic, I launched a project in 2014 on the origins of pottery in southern Kyushu, of southern Japan. There, materials from the earliest pottery period, the Incipient Jomon starting ca. 14,000/13,500 cal B.P., are found below a tephra layer dated to ca. 12,800 cal B.P. This place has among the most intact geochronology for the late Pleistocene pottery in East Asia. The Incipient Jomon people of southern Kyushu were relatively sedentary foragers. Pottery in the northern area is assumed to have been produced and consumed in situ, but the evidence from the southern island suggests some long-distance transportations. We are currently testing these assumptions with instrumentation techniques.

Furthermore, the genetic and materials evidence increasingly suggests that people migrated to the Americas from Northeast Asia and the earliest American sites are roughly contemporary with the timing of the emergence of pottery in northeastern Asia. However, no late Pleistocene pottery has been confirmed in the Americas. We plan to investigate this issue in the coming years.