I'm an ecological anthropologist, a North American archaeologist, a paleoethnobotanist, and a proud product of public schools. I was born in McAllen, Texas in the Rio Grande Valley. I lived in East Texas and Louisiana until my family moved to Las Vegas when I was 10. I received her high school diploma from Ed. W. Clark High in Las Vegas. 

I began my college career at University of Nevada, Las Vegas and finished my bachelor’s in anthropology at San Jose State University. My senior honors thesis, "Hopi Agricultural System," is a systemic analysis of Hopi Agriculture.

I completed my graduate work at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. My master's thesis examines historic maps and documents to reconstruct Indigenous landscapes at the time of contact with Europeans in the Southeastern United States.

My dissertation explores ancient cultural landscapes and land use patterns in Coastal California, specifically how Chumash may have used their generational knowledge of fire ecology as a resource management practice. 

My research combines ecology, botany, archaeology, and ethnohistory. I have a profound relationship with landscapes, which is reflected in my writing. She has done fieldwork in five regions of North America: California, the Great Basin, the Southwest, the Southeast and the Columbia Plateau. I consider myself extremely fortunate to live at the foot of the Sierra Nevada in Reno, Nevada. 

Currently my research is tied to anthropogenic landscapes and projecting possible future outcomes based on historical ecology, current geopolitical issues, the climate science, and a fundamental understanding of human behavior. I recently wrote a book of fiction that is an attempt to characterize life after the combined collapse of the climate and state level societies. I'm now beginning research for chapter to be included in a book which will be published by Routledge Press called The Handbook of Anthropology and Climate. More about that project in a box below.