University of California, Davis
Post-Doc, Anthropology
UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow
About
I am an anthropological archaeologist and post-doctoral researcher specializing in historic pottery technology in Spanish California. My doctoral research, completed at the University of California-Santa Cruz, investigated pottery technological style to examine the patterned ways pluralistic communities produced pottery in some of the northernmost Spanish colonial institutions in California. I reconstructed six steps of the ceramic manufacturing sequence utilizing petrography, attribute analysis, and experimental replication studies. Based on my analysis, I suggest that potters within mission communities, but not between, shared a technological style with regard to the construction of ceramic vessels. Social identities structured around each institution may have emerged out of these communities of ceramic practice. Just as in precolonial times, native peoples may have constructed social identities tied to place; in this historical moment, however, that place was a mission rather than a village or tribe.
In the Center for Archaeological Research at Davis, I continue my work addressing the technological style of ceramic production and use, focusing my research on ceramic collections from various contexts at Mission San Antonio de Padua. My work emphasizes the relationships between technology, daily practice, and social identity.
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