At both intellectual and personal levels, I see my research and teaching as mutually reinforcing and reciprocally connected. My work in highland Andean communities has instilled in me a commitment to representing their experiences—past and present—with fidelity, and in terms that resonate with students of many backgrounds. This experiential core motivates my classroom efforts to build understanding of both global human diversity and our common humanity. In a time of simultaneous social connection and profound fragmentation, anthropological perspectives are urgently needed to convey how the taken-for-granted nature of students’ realities is connected to the lives of seemingly distant others, and to historical legacies and cultural forces of which they may be only dimly aware.

I also strive to confer concrete, transferrable, high-value skills in all of my courses. All of of my courses include experiential, hands-on components. These range from cutting edge 3D scanning of artifacts and excavation contexts, through geospatial analytics and remote sensing analyses, to experiments in ancient technologies, such as lithic production. These experiential components provide enacted, often team-oriented opportunities for learning-by-doing. Many students have established their careers based on the combination of the skills and the creative, out-of-the-box thinking they have acquired in these courses. Below is a partial list of the courses I have taught:

Undergraduate Courses

• Introduction to Archaeology: The Rise and Fall of Civilizations.
• Introduction to GIS and Remote Sensing
• Archaeological Excavation (field course–dig on Vanderbilt campus). See stories here and here.
• The Inca Empire (See photos)
• Colonial Encounters in the Americas
• Anthropologies and Archaeologies of Community
• Religion in Cross-Cultural Encounters: Conversion and Transformation in the New World
• Digital archaeology: Analysis and Curation of Material Culture

Graduate Seminars

• Proseminar: Professionalization and the Practice of Anthropology
• Advanced Spatial Analysis
• Historical Anthropology
• Seminar in South American Archaeology & Ethnohistory
• Archaeology, History, Ethnohistory: Current Syntheses
• Digital Archaeology