While a South Asianist by training, my most recent research interest has shifted to Europe and the Roma/Romani/Sinti peoples who left India over one thousand years ago and are now dispersed over most of Europe. I am specifically interested in Roma activism that focuses on: educating Roma youth (about the Romani Holocaust or Porajmos and the history of discrimination in Europe) and on the legal action of civil society groups against discrimination in education, housing, employment, and freedom of movement within the EU.

My research over the last 20 years has centered on the origin and practice of agropastoralism in the Pyrenees Mountains and Iberian Systems of continental Europe. I am particularly interested in the pivotal role played by agropastoralism in the social, political, economic and religious transformations in the Franco-Iberian region during the last 2,000 years. I seldom work alone and my collaborations are designed to integrate geomorphic, geophysical, archaeological and socioecological evidence to reveal the contingency and behavioral variability of human agents in tran

My scholarship has shifted from constructive (policy- and practice-oriented) to more critical orientations over time, yet I have an ongoing interest in engaged research in the service of social justice and environmental sustainability. Themes of ongoing interest include land and environmental governance; the political-economic and ontological roots of inequality; and how theory and method can be deployed in support of more sustainable, anti-oppressive futures.

My research focuses in part on the application of geoarchaeological methods to the study Early and Middle Holocene human occupation, cultural adaptations and climate change. In our research on the continental shelves of the American Southeast we have sought to discriminate between ecological variables and culturally-based decisions for detecting the spatial and temporal variation in site locations.

Much of my research has been engaged with issues related to the political ecology of environmental degradation, indigenous rights, and conservation in Sarawak, Malaysia (Borneo). My research in Sarawak initially focused on the international rainforest campaign centered on Penan hunter-gatherers, and I continue to be involved in efforts to seek acknowledgement of Penan land claims in oil palm plantations and national parks.

The major impacts of my research have been developing approaches for understanding organizational complexity and diversity in Indigenous Pre-Columbian eastern North America and in non-state societies globally. My work as an archaeologist is inherently comparative and multi-scalar and has evolved from the study of settlement aggregation in eastern North America to the development of theories, models, and approaches that productively interrogate the nature of premodern social and political organization across the globe.