My research interests all reflect a concern with the manifestation of social realities in the patterning of material things, I have done prehistoric, historic, and ethno-archaeology; my field research has taken place in North America, in and around New York City, on the Zuni Reservation and in the Rio Grande Valley in New Mexico. I have also worked with museum collections and feel that such collections represent an increasingly significant resource for scholars. I have studied, and continue to be interested in, a number of socio-cultural issues: colonial encounters in North America, changes in gender role and status, the construction and recognition of coherent sub-units within urban entities, and the way in which food is used to express social and symbolic concepts. In trying to understand the past, additions to traditional archaeological data, such as the use of documentary information, and the observation of the interaction between people and things in living societies (including how artifacts enter the archaeological record), are important sources of information.

Representative Publications: 

1981. With Cantwell, A-M. and J. B. Griffin, and N. Rothschild, eds. The Research Potential of Anthropological Museum Collections. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, v. 376, New York, NY.

1990. New York City Neighborhoods, The Eighteenth Century, San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

1991. Prehistoric Dimensions of Status: Gender and Age in Eastern North America. NewYork, NY: Garland Publishing.

1994. With Leacock, Eleanor B., eds. Labrador Winter: The Ethnographic Journals of William Duncan Strong, 1927-28. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

2003. Colonial Encounters in a Native American Landscape: The Spanish and Dutch in North America. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC.