I am a full-time geomorphologist and geoarchaeologist with several ongoing field projects spread throughout the eastern United States. In the fall of 2007, I joined the Department of Physics, Astronomy, & Geosciences at Valdosta State University. Some of my students there will soon have the opportunity to work with me and Dennis Blanton of the Fernbank Museum in reconstructing past environments along the Ocmulgee River here in south Georgia. Dennis is investigating archaeological sites which show the presence of the Spanish in the upper Coastal Plain. He is searching in particular for a 17th century Spanish mission, Santa Isabel de Utinahica. My students and I are part of a multidisciplinary team which is describing the stratigraphy, soils, and coring Holocene wetlands within the area investigated. Other active projects here in Georgia involve submerged logs in the Altamaha River downstream of Doctortown and biostratigraphy of a limestone quarry in Houston County.

Completed research projects and publications range from alluvial stratigraphy to barrier island formation to glaciated landscapes. My dissertation was on the North Branch of the Susquehanna River in northeastern Pennsylvania. I have had two full-time academic appointments over the past two years in addition to my part-time teaching at GPC. At Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, I taught sedimentary and environmental geology. At Georgia State University, I taught weather and climate.

I arrived at my current scientific profession by a very indirect path. I actually began college in Sarasota, Florida thinking that I wanted to be an artist Both my paternal grandmother and her sister were illustrators, Tabea and Melita Hofmann. I did have some talent at art, but I became disillusioned with art scholarship and solipsism. While I was still in college, in the summer of 1978, I had my first summer job as an archaeological field technician. After that summer, I continued to work in archaeology for nearly ten years, primarily in the Southeastern United States. Along the way, I got hooked on the Southwest while visiting my maternal great aunt (Seraph Stevenson, nee Wedge). Aunt Seraph lived in Sedona, Arizona. That took me out to the Navajo Reservation for summer and to graduate school at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. I earned a Master's in Anthropology at SIU-Carbondale in 1989.

By the final years of my studies in Carbondale, I had already been corrupted by an excellent introduction to geomorphology under both Dale Ritter and Craig Kochel. Jerry Miller was actually my T.A. at one point. I began writing geomorphology reports for contract archaeologists with only that basic geomorphology course under my belt. Realizing that I wanted to pursue a Ph.D, and that I needed some more geology, I found the archaeological geology program at the University of Georgia in Athens. I began that program in 1993, and it took me ten years to complete my Ph.D.

Much of my research is descriptive and graphically oriented, as you might expect from my intellectual background. I employ soil micromorphology, the examination of soils in thin-section under the petrographic microscope, to identify both geological and cultural features in samples from archaeological sites. In my dissertation, my emphasis was on features that relate to the time that soils have had to develop at particular depths within deep stratified alluvial deposits. In addition to the purely descriptive analysis, I did suggest some mechanisms that drive river sedimentation in the interior of the eastern United States during the Holocene epoch. I particularly emphasized the regional climate, which I believe to be affected by changes in the Atlantic Ocean circulation. Other research topics which have engaged me throughout my career are the age of glacial deposits in the eastern U.S., changes in the level of the sea during the Holocene epoch, and the materials that prehistoric people have used for making pottery.

Click here to view my complete curriculum vitae.

Click here to read some of my research reports in Geoarchaeology.