Explore Our Research

Since 1992, Michele Gamburd has done longitudinal ethnographic research in a Sinhala-speaking village in southwestern Sri Lanka that sends migrant laborers to the Persian Gulf. Her most recent book addresses issues of aging, demographic transformation, and changing intergenerational obligations in rural families.

The Indian Ocean Tsunami of 2004 killed over 30,000 and destroyed more than 100,000 homes in Sri Lanka. In The Golden Wave, Michele Gamburd explores humanitarian aid, class hierarchies and disaster diplomacy amid the catastrophe. Her continuing research engages with disaster mitigation and preparation in the Pacific Northwest.

Shelby Anderson, working with colleagues, students and community partners, is exploring the history and continuity of food traditions of Arctic peoples by studying past and present foodways and drawing information and data from a variety of sources.

This project led by Mrinalini Tankha explores how Cubans are using cryptocurrency to access global financial markets, online retail marketplaces and easier flow of remittances by circumventing tightened sanctions from the U.S. The project uses an iterative research framework based on interviews with tech entrepreneurs.

A 10-year demographic study of red variegated lemurs begun in 2013 by Natalie Vasey aims to track survivorship and other demographic parameters with respect to years since protection within the Masoala National Park, extreme weather (cyclones) and other climatic variables, and adverse anthropogenic impacts.

This project, led by Amiee Potter, examines tooth crown formation and root closure schedules to estimate the age of systemic indicators of injury, illness, growth disruption during life, and determine accurate age at death in sub-adult human remains within a forensic context.

On-going research led by Amiee Potter focuses on identifying disease allele maintenance in specific populations. This work includes a meta-review with former student Marianne Cooper testing the hypothesis of a heterozygous advantage under certain environmental conditions in carriers of pathogenic PAH variants. 

Sarah Sterling devised a measurement scheme that allowed her to systematically compare the construction of ceramic types between assemblages from different locations across Egypt, with implications for understanding broader economic interactions during the Egyptian Old Kingdom Period (ca 3000-2000 BC).

An ethnographic film by Mrinalini Tankha about the rise and fall of Cuba's dual currency system (the Cuban Peso and the Cuban Convertible Peso) and the impacts it had on the everyday lives of the Cuban people, using currency iconography and interviews with a range of people.

In ongoing collaborative research with the U.S. National Park Service, Doug Deur works with multiple tribes and researchers to document what is known about plant use traditions in lands now managed as national parks and helps introduce tribal traditional knowledge into contemporary natural resource management planning.

This project, led by Doug Wilson, is summarizing multiple years of excavations at the village at Fort Vancouver in an effort to address colonial identities, industries, and history, while engaging modern communities in the colonial legacy of the Hudson's Bay Company and U.S. Army.

This project, led by Doug Wilson, is summarizing the breadth and depth of historical archaeology practice in the region extending from British Columbia to Oregon and into Idaho, including 19th and 20th century material culture and documentary evidence through the archaeological exploration of colonial settler and indigenous sites.

Working within Kwakwaka’wakw cultural protocols and under the guidance of the clan chieftainship, Doug Deur has helped develop a monumental repository of information relating to key cultural practices relating to the natural world as part of a decades-long collaboration. 

Sarah Sterling and Virginia Butler collaborated with Pacific NW archaeologists and coastal geomorphologists to reconstruct the settlement history and environmental conditions during the 2000 plus years of occupation at Čḯxwicən, a Lower Elwha Klallam Village on the shore of Port Angeles Harbor.

Population and habitat surveys of the variegated lemur in northeastern Madagascar begun in 2018 by Natalie Vasey will help resolve the question of species delimitations and allow assessment of in situ threats and in situ and ex situ population health, thereby attuning ongoing, region-specific biodiversity management.

This project, led by Reno Nims, integrates paleoclimate records, fisheries biology, archaeological landscape histories, and archaeological assemblages of fish remains to identify the relationships between changing environmental conditions, human harvest pressures, and developments in Māori fishing methods and technologies themselves.

Working with the Fort Mojave Indian and Fort Yuma Quechan tribes, Doug Deur and Kate Monti Barcalow aim to improve consultation between agencies, tribes and developers around large-scale solar projects and other renewable energy development on lands of tribal cultural significance in California.

Trans Women Connected is a NIMHD-funded project led by Charles Klein to develop a sexual health app for transgender women in the U.S. The app is grounded within gender affirmation and social support and explicitly recognizes the role of resilience in promoting physical and mental health in the face of stigma and discrimination.

Jeremy Spoon and Kate Monti Barcalow have helped facilitate the relationship between the DOE and 16 tribes culturally affiliated with the Nevada National Security Site to restore native plants to a 92-acre site. The approach combines Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge with restoration ecology best practices.

This NSF-funded project, led by Jeremy Spoon, focuses on short- and long-term Indigenous and rural tangible and intangible disaster recoveries in Nepal. The longitudinal project tracks 400 households over nearly 10 years to understand household and settlement resilience and transformation following the 2015 catastrophic earthquakes.

Since 2013, Charles Klein has been working in São Paulo urban periphery communities, with a focus on cultural political movements, emerging class identities, and first-generation college students. Publications have covered the so-called "new middle class," political subjectivities and intersectional activism, and economic mobility.

Reno Nims is analyzing early archaeological fishbone assemblages from the Marquesas Islands to study the variability of Ancestral Polynesian fisheries, and improve best practices for the zooarchaeological analysis of fish remains in Oceania.

This project, co-led by Shelby Anderson and funded by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, aims to understand the long-term history of human-water interaction over the last 10,000 years, and to use that information to inform future environmental restoration and heritage preservation efforts in the region.