Doctoral Candidate in Anthropology
About
I am an anthropological archaeologist whose work focuses on the political economies, exchange networks, and social histories of pre-Columbian Andean societies, with a particular emphasis on the Late Formative period (600 BCE–200 CE) in the Cusco region of Peru, a critically understudied era that predates the rise of both the Wari and Inka empires.
Prior scholarship has interpreted this period through the lens of emerging chiefdoms, but that model rests largely on regional survey data alone. My excavations at Muyumoqo are among the first to directly address these questions with original field data, asking whether inequality was increasing, how it was materialized, and what role long-distance exchange played in driving it. To do so, I integrate excavation and regional survey data with archaeometric methods and spatial modeling. This work is shedding new light on the economic and political processes that shaped Andean societies centuries before the Inka emerged.
