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teaching philosophy

Deciding to go to graduate school is probably the single most important decision that a student in archaeology will make. It is the difference between digging and leading, between staying within budget and orchestrating that budget, between participation in a discipline and shaping that discipline. I believe that to succeed in a competitive market, graduate students need to balance many talents. To realize their potential, they should have a solid theoretical and methodological foundation in the four subfields of Anthropology. They should have good writing skills and social intelligence. More importantly, they need to integrate all of these skills into a holistic package through effective and transparent communication that is grounded in empirical research. My aspiration is to produce graduate students who push the boundaries of the discipline regardless of their particular career trajectory - be it government, private, or academic - and to consider the ethical and practical dimensions of their practice.

My goal in undergraduate education is to introduce students to the adventure of archaeology while showing them the relevance of the past to the modern world. Archaeology is a discipline that stands at the crossroads of the sciences and the humanities, but it also has contemporary political and social dimensions. Archaeologists work on projects to recover lost soldiers and return genocide victims to their relatives, and they assist military officials with the recovery of looted antiquities during times of war. They help land managers and city planners to create more sustainable environments for the future. And they testify in court cases where heritage and cultural resources are in danger or where ownership it hotly contested. Archaeology grapples with the thorny issue of what it means to be human in a complex and changing world, but it does this through the application of advanced scientific methods, where researchers balance the pursuit of knowledge and ethical concerns over how this information is used. My courses challenge undergraduate students to think critically about the past and how it is presented to them in the popular media through lectures, class exercises, and debate.

Undergraduate students also work with me in the archaeology laboratory at SMU on active research projects stemming from the archaeology field school. I also mentor students in the field, introducing them to the people, arts, and cultures of the American Southwest. In the field, students extend their anthropological training through community-based programming and service learning using state-of the art technologies including GPS, remote sensing, and dendrochronology. Many of these students choose to extend their field experiences through focused independent study. My requirement for this is that students produce meaningful research that is useful to the host community or the government agencies where we work.