My research focuses on the history of human and animal interactions in marine settings. I have conducted analysis and fieldwork on many coastal archaeological sites, including shell middens, in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. My expertise is the analysis of bird bones from archaeological sites (zooarchaeology). My goals include both elucidating the past and generating data to address contemporary environmental and biological conservation issues. Archaeology can provide the critical long-term temporal dimension needed to understand human response to gradual and abrupt environmental changes (e.g., climate change, tectonic events, sea level rise) and also the current status of modern animal populations. For example, Double-crested Cormorants were not observed breeding in the San Juan Islands of Washington until the 1930s, so ornithologists had questioned whether this was a re-colonizing event or an entirely new expansion; I answered this question when I found archaeological evidence for a 1500 year-old rookery on the islands. Although my focus so far has been on the Pacific Coast, I am also interested in initiating research on archaeological sites on the east coast.