overview
- He received his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh (1993) and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Calgary. He was previously a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Kentucky and has also been an Associate Professor at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. His current research is on the historical ecology of the Northwest and Upper Amazon, with a focus on the frontier regions of Colombia, Peru and Brazil. This studies involve history of the region, change in settlement patterns through time of indigenous people, and the ecology of the region. He has conducted research in the origins of food production, pottery, and sedentism. He works on a long-term research project on the historical ecology of the Tairona-Kogui, as well as on the Mesay river in Amazonia and the region of Iquitos-Nauta. He teach courses in Historical Ecology, Ecology of Religion, and Shamanism. Another interest is in the history of ethnographic and archaeological research on the Andes and the Amazonia. He is the co-author of the book San Jacinto 1: An Historical Ecology of an Archaic site (University of Alabama Press, 2005) and co-editor of the book Advances in the Archaeology of the Northern Andes (Institute of Archaeology, UCLA, 1998), and editor of History of Latin American Archaeology (Avebury press, 1994). He has published ethnographic articles on the Kogui (Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta) and the Tikuna (Amazon river region), and archaeology articles on the excavations at San Jacinto 1, region of Gaira, Parque Tairona, Ciudad Perdida in the northwest of Colombia.