My PhD is focused on better understanding archaeology as a discipline and arguing for more thorough and focused research on the discipline itself.  

This research focuses on 4 main components: the fragmentation of archaeology, a naturalized archaeological science, an archaeological domain, and institutionality and conventionality in archaeology.  The most simple explanation of this work is that archaeology has become to rely too heavily on informality and personal experience through a 'craft' framework.  The practice, while one of immense value to developing innovative and diverse approaches to archaeology, is becoming unsustainable as its foundation in informality limits accessibility and communication. 

The lack of communication has led to a fragmentation of archaeology, a breakdown in the ability to communicate between various diverse traditions of archaeology.  However, within that broad and varied informal practice of archaeology is something that continues to bind the field together. My thesis is arguing for a deeper study and examination of the archaeological domain, the who, what, where, when, why, and how, of archaeology to understand whether there is a naturalized science that has developed in the discipline.  

Such a practice is not beholden to any model of science but is something that is unique to archaeology and has formed over decades of common, yet informal, practice.  The final aspect of my thesis is proposing a stronger, formal, institutional conventionality in which basic standard vocabularies, methods, and definitions can be held in a dynamic, yet stable way. This is to provide a framework of formality in which archaeologists have stable foundations to work towards or against and can utilize to communicate more effectively. 

I also have a specialization in databases, GIS, and Photogrammetry and have been working on the Shanxi Digital Documentation Project.