As an archaeobotanist, I study past human-plant interaction, with a primary geographic focus on the southern Levant. I seek to bring the local data I generate to bear on scholarship of plant domestication and diffusion, ancient agriculture/pastoralism, and ancient economic history in the Mediterranean and beyond. My ongoing Marie S. Curie International Fellowship project, CroProLITE (Crop Production in the Levant and International Trade Exchange), seeks to evaluate agricultural transformation in the 1st millennium CE Negev desert and beyond through ancient plant remains and multi-proxy analysis of herbivore coprolites. I believe that long-term historical and archaeological perspectives can improve understandings of contemporary issues related to globalization, climate change, biodiversity, and global food security.
